I went downstairs first. I didn’t visit the room where I’d been kept. I had no desire to see that again. But I went into the supply room at the back of the hall and found the cabinet with the drugs. There were jars filled with all sorts of pills and small vials of various colored liquids.
I noticed three bottles of clear liquid on the top shelf. One was open and half empty. I removed the lid, touched the tip of my finger to the liquid, then touched my finger to my tongue. There was no taste, which by itself didn’t tell me anything. But I opened one of the sealed bottles and carefully tasted that, again with my finger tip. This time, I instinctively spat out as the familiar, bitter flavor spread across my tongue. The two liquids were definitely different, though the labels were the same, with some long chemical name I couldn’t even guess how to pronounce. If this was the stuff Bowdler had been giving me, someone had replaced my medicine with water. I had no idea why.
I headed for the office on the first floor. The file cabinets were locked. No problem. I unlocked them with my mind, slid open the top drawer, and scanned the tabs on the hanging folders. It was mostly electronics catalogues, old magazine articles, and other useless stuff.
Near the back was a fat folder with my name on it. I pulled it out and put it on the desk. Then I looked through the rest of the drawers, making sure there weren’t files with my friends’ names on them. I didn’t see any, which I took as a good sign. Maybe Bowdler didn’t know about the guys. Not yet. But if he dug into my past, there was a risk he’d figure out I wasn’t the only one with a hidden talent.
I still had no idea who’d kidnapped me. There weren’t any memos or letters or anything like that. The next room looked like some kind of electronics lab. There were a couple empty take-out cartons and a coffee cup on the work table, along with a jumble of scattered parts. Small pieces of wire littered the floor. All the other rooms I’d seen were neat and clean. I had the feeling someone had been working here all night assembling something.
I found a cardboard box that contained several small devices with lots of buttons on them. Each of the devices had a label attached with a rubber band. I read a couple of them, hoping I could find something useful, but they didn’t mean anything to me. A handwritten note on top read: Douglas, here are the prototypes of our current projects. I thought you might enjoy an advance look. Maybe you can work them into our next round of contracts. Feel free to be inventive. It was signed with scrawled initials I couldn’t make out.
None of the other rooms had anything interesting. I sat down to read my file. The stack of handwritten sheets didn’t tell me much. It was mostly filled with the results of experiments. It looked like Bowdler had run hundreds of different tests. He’d drugged me pretty heavily at first, then adjusted the dosage until I was in a state where I’d do what he asked but not try to escape.
There were a bunch of references to people I’d never heard of. Stuff like: subject shows much greater range than that attributed to Kalnikov or unlike accounts of Sherenova, subject is not hyper-susceptible to distractions.
The last entry read, The disrupter functions perfectly. We can proceed immediately with the miniaturized version.
Disrupter? I wondered what that was. I skimmed some of the earlier pages, but none of the other entries mentioned it. There was also nothing about my family, or about any plans for me after the experiments were done. Maybe he was just going to lock me away forever, or burn me up for real. I fought down the urge to destroy the place. It was better if I left no trace of my visit. I didn’t want him to know I was still in town.
I’d learned all I could here. I put the file back where I’d found it and checked around to make sure I hadn’t disturbed anything. But there was one more thing I could do before I left. I figured a lot of stuff never got printed out, and wouldn’t be in the file cabinets. The important stuff could all be on the computer. My MP3 player also worked as a flash drive. I went to one of the computers, plugged into the USB port, and copied the documents folder.
That’s when I heard a key in the door. I yanked out the MP3 player and looked around for a place to hide.
“You’re good with locks, my young friend,” someone called from the hallway. “But you know nothing about alarms. That’s why you need me. I can teach you.”
Bowdler’s voice was like a shot of sulfuric acid pumped directly into my veins. I hadn’t even thought there’d be an alarm. My desire to hurt him went to war with my desire not to look into those eyes again. The last time I’d lashed out in panic, I’d killed someone. If I did that now, I’d never get answers to my questions. I needed a minute to calm myself and figure out how to do this right.