Nic entered first with Carter behind him, both men kept low and tight, pivoting cautiously and scanning the corners and angles for potential threats. The exit door sat in the back of a storage room, perhaps a fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot square lined with shelves filled with miscellaneous office supplies and lab equipment. Nic pushed through a door into the next room.

Burke saw the blood before he saw the bodies. Bullet holes perforated all of the victims and the walls, many of the dead workers still at their stations or making it only a few feet before being gunned down. He could see where others had tried to hide beneath tables but had been found and eliminated. The victims closest to the exit appeared to have been killed with a sub-machine gun, while the ones farther from the exit had died from shotgun blasts.

The lab was perhaps 70 feet wide by 100 feet long with 15 foot walls. It held several aluminum tables lined up in rows and topped with computers and lab equipment. It felt cold, and the air smelled unnaturally clean and tinged with an electrostatic element. Burke guessed that this was a clean room similar to ones he had seen for producing microchips and experimenting with deadly viruses.

The equipment at the workstations was all wrong, however. There were no test tubes or microscopes, but electronic components, multimeters and all manner of sophisticated-looking machines whose purpose was a mystery to him. The more he looked at the equipment, the more Burke was reminded of the thermal chambers and battery cyclers he had read about at General Motors’s new $25 million battery lab, which was dedicated to the development of the power sources for the company’s electric cars.

“Burke, mind the blood,” Carter said. “This is a crime scene now.”

Burke looked down, not having realized that he had moved to one of the tables and stood beside one of the bodies, his feet resting in an ever-expanding pool of bodily fluids. He could still smell hints of gun powder and the coppery odor of blood, but the lab’s air scrubbers had ionized most of it.

He forced himself to look at the dead scientists. They were a mix of nationalities and genders. He memorized their faces, trying to remain distant from the terror he saw on their features and their glassy, dead eyes. He had seen cadavers before and dead people at funerals, but never anyone freshly killed at a crime scene. He tried not to think of them as people, merely as more clues, details to be analyzed.

He approached one of the workstations and tried to power it on, but it displayed an error stating that the hard drive was missing.

“Look at this,” Nic said.

Burke walked over to where Nic stood beside one wall of the lab that appeared to hold a long glass viewing panel. On closer inspection though, Burke guessed it was actually several inches of some type of explosive-resistant polycarbonate. The room on the other side of the clear barrier looked like it was used for testing explosive ordnance of some kind. The walls had been charred from apparent explosions. Or perhaps, sudden bursts of electrical discharge?