The government had to be warned. Without a treatment, a pandemic was on the way that would make SARS and bird flu look like a summer cold. The time of an individual hospital using its isolation procedures to deal with Janus was passing quickly. The world was far too interconnected now. Every minute Kazimi stayed locked up inside Red Cliff was a minute too long.

Don’t give up.

Kazimi turned his attention to making a more detailed inspection of the mouse house. If he believed in what he saw when Costello crossed the Great Room, and he believed there was nothing to be found in the lab, then the passage had to be in the annex. He passed through the doorway into the secondary structure. The plastic cages were lined up on shelves across one of the end walls and extended along half of one adjacent long wall. About half of the cages were occupied, and as they always did, the mice reacted to his arrival with a prescient step-up in activity. The large, stainless-steel refrigeration units were at the other end of the room.

Kazimi noted the areas that were almost certainly blind spots to the security camera. He stood in one of them, directly beneath the camera lens, and once again carefully surveyed the room. At first glance he saw nothing unusual. Then, after a minute or so of quiet observation, he did. It wasn’t a defect in the fieldstone or shelving or floor. It was the distance from where he stood to the opposite wall. It looked shorter than the length of the lab next door. Not a lot shorter, but …

Keeping as far to the left of the camera as possible, Kazimi nonchalantly paced off the distance. Twenty-three strides. At approximately three feet per stride, the room was sixty-nine feet long.

Swallowing against the dryness of excitement that had materialized in his throat, Kazimi moved back into the lab and, mixing a bowl of liquid agar, casually measured the length of that room. Twenty-six strides, once, then a second time. Seventy-eight feet. The annex, which he initially had thought was identical in length to the lab, was three strides less.

Nine feet were missing.

Why would the contractor of the place cut nine feet off a room that, at first glance, looked to be exactly the same dimensions as the room adjacent to it? Perhaps rock on the other side of the wall prohibited going any farther. But that made little sense considering the whole wing—Great Room and storage areas—was hewn out of solid rock.

He peered across at the door to the Great Room. The footsteps, whoever they belonged to, had vanished. Perhaps a janitor, who had moved to the far side of the vast room.