much of that. She searched the dresser drawers—completely empty. She saw a duffel bag at the foot of the bed and rifled through it. Just clothing, nothing in the pockets. She saw a single shallow drawer in the desk and went to it, sliding it open.
A white MacBook Air lay closed inside.
A smile eased its way across Veronica's lips as she set the machine on the desk, flipped it open, and lit the thing up. She was immediately greeted with a password prompt, not unexpected, but she knew some rudimentary CIA hacking tricks, restarting it in safe mode, gaining administrator access, bypassing the security altogether, and accessing the root directories.
Biochemists, she thought with a smirk.
In moments, she was looking at Xander's programs and files. There were the usual office productivity applications, but also some specialized programs as well. Her brow furrowed as she read a few of the names: Matlab, Stata, ChemPro, GenTrack, and SequenceGuru...
What the hell were these programs? She clicked one at random.
The title of one of the panes read, Gene Mutation , and beneath that were twin columns of data with values like, Tac-1, Pep-4, etc. Veronica had heard the shipboard rumors of dinosaurs being pulled from the underground lake, but she figured they were just boring bones. Why would Xander—or anyone—be working with genes already if they didn't have any actual dinosaurs yet? Wishful thinking? Did they find a way to clone them from bones that still had some marrow left?
Suddenly, she felt a vibration in her pocket and pulled out her smartphone, reading the text on screen, a red exclamation point accompanying the message: URGENT: SHIP'S DOCTOR REPORT TO AFT WORK DECK IMMEDIATELY FOR CREW INJURY WITH HEAVY EQUIPMENT!
It was the first such page she'd received since boarding the tanker in South America . Just as she was beginning to think shipboard doctors had it easy... Crap! Who would have thought these at-sea M.D.s actually has to work? Her cover was predicated on the fact that statistically, a few days on board should be incident free, meaning that all she would need to do was fill a few prescriptions from the infirmary. So much for that.
Skimming rapidly through one of the other panes on the screen, she saw a table of electron micrographs depicting the inner workings of various microbes, none of which meant anything to her, as well as what looked like an X-ray with the caption, Cross-section of Cerebellum Post-injection . A block of dense, jargon-laced text with terms like, weaponized , Mesozoic viral load , reptilian host, cross-species vector ...Realizing she had no time to take all this in now, she used her smartphone to snap a picture of the screen.
Veronica hurriedly closed the app and shut down Xander's Macbook. She put it back in the desk and stepped back to look at the entire area to make sure everything looked as it had before she got here. Check .
She put her ear to the door, listening for a moment to make certain no one was coming down the hall. Clear . Then she opened the door and slipped into the hallway, closing the door softly behind her.
She checked the handle to make sure it was locked and then proceeded down the hall, holding her phone out in front of her as though she were a busy doctor just receiving an alert.
11.
Aboard Oil Tanker Hammond-1, Erebus, Antarctica
Marcus looked up from embracing his son to see the crewman who'd acted as his jailer return from the adjacent part of the hold, staring at them, hoping for a good argument that could entertain him, as he whiled away the rest of his shift at the shabby little desk. Marcus pointed toward the end of the hold where the crate was.
“Let's go to my quarters where we might find a little privacy.” He glared at the guard, and then he and Alex walked out of the brig and into the section where the crate had been delivered. It was busy with workers now wrestling a huge, adult dinosaur body onto a specially constructed wheeled platform
A white MacBook Air lay closed inside.
A smile eased its way across Veronica's lips as she set the machine on the desk, flipped it open, and lit the thing up. She was immediately greeted with a password prompt, not unexpected, but she knew some rudimentary CIA hacking tricks, restarting it in safe mode, gaining administrator access, bypassing the security altogether, and accessing the root directories.
Biochemists, she thought with a smirk.
In moments, she was looking at Xander's programs and files. There were the usual office productivity applications, but also some specialized programs as well. Her brow furrowed as she read a few of the names: Matlab, Stata, ChemPro, GenTrack, and SequenceGuru...
What the hell were these programs? She clicked one at random.
The title of one of the panes read, Gene Mutation , and beneath that were twin columns of data with values like, Tac-1, Pep-4, etc. Veronica had heard the shipboard rumors of dinosaurs being pulled from the underground lake, but she figured they were just boring bones. Why would Xander—or anyone—be working with genes already if they didn't have any actual dinosaurs yet? Wishful thinking? Did they find a way to clone them from bones that still had some marrow left?
Suddenly, she felt a vibration in her pocket and pulled out her smartphone, reading the text on screen, a red exclamation point accompanying the message: URGENT: SHIP'S DOCTOR REPORT TO AFT WORK DECK IMMEDIATELY FOR CREW INJURY WITH HEAVY EQUIPMENT!
It was the first such page she'd received since boarding the tanker in South America . Just as she was beginning to think shipboard doctors had it easy... Crap! Who would have thought these at-sea M.D.s actually has to work? Her cover was predicated on the fact that statistically, a few days on board should be incident free, meaning that all she would need to do was fill a few prescriptions from the infirmary. So much for that.
Skimming rapidly through one of the other panes on the screen, she saw a table of electron micrographs depicting the inner workings of various microbes, none of which meant anything to her, as well as what looked like an X-ray with the caption, Cross-section of Cerebellum Post-injection . A block of dense, jargon-laced text with terms like, weaponized , Mesozoic viral load , reptilian host, cross-species vector ...Realizing she had no time to take all this in now, she used her smartphone to snap a picture of the screen.
Veronica hurriedly closed the app and shut down Xander's Macbook. She put it back in the desk and stepped back to look at the entire area to make sure everything looked as it had before she got here. Check .
She put her ear to the door, listening for a moment to make certain no one was coming down the hall. Clear . Then she opened the door and slipped into the hallway, closing the door softly behind her.
She checked the handle to make sure it was locked and then proceeded down the hall, holding her phone out in front of her as though she were a busy doctor just receiving an alert.
11.
Aboard Oil Tanker Hammond-1, Erebus, Antarctica
Marcus looked up from embracing his son to see the crewman who'd acted as his jailer return from the adjacent part of the hold, staring at them, hoping for a good argument that could entertain him, as he whiled away the rest of his shift at the shabby little desk. Marcus pointed toward the end of the hold where the crate was.
“Let's go to my quarters where we might find a little privacy.” He glared at the guard, and then he and Alex walked out of the brig and into the section where the crate had been delivered. It was busy with workers now wrestling a huge, adult dinosaur body onto a specially constructed wheeled platform
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