CHAPTER 41

Astonished and bewildered by what he had discovered, Gabe stood beside the recessed doorway to Lab B-10 willing his pulse to slow and his sense of what was smart to take over.

Get back to the house. . . . Get back and regroup!

He was alone in the brightly lit corridor of an underground laboratory that had at least one tunneling scanning microscope—the pricey, highly technical, sine qua non centerpiece of nanotechnology research. The facility, carved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the Shenandoah Valley, was reached from one direction through a little-used hidden entrance in the guest wing of Lily Sexton's opulent country home. There had to be one or more other entrances as well, but how far they were from this one was anybody's guess.

Go back!

Two things were all too clear at this point. The brilliant, elegant, beguiling Ms. Sexton had far more than a passing interest in nanotechnology—one of the sciences she was slated to try to place under government control should she become the country's first Secretary of Science and Technology. In addition, she quite probably had more than the passing acquaintance she claimed to have had with Dr. Jim Ferendelli.

Gabe was equidistant between the door back to Lily Sexton's house and the next doorway on the corridor, which he could see was B-9. His best approach would be to head back and, as soon as possible, check some real estate ledgers and maps involving the area. But the part of him that had always caused trouble was urging him on—at least to the next room.

This is dumb and risky, he warned himself, as he inched along the wall toward B-9.

Risky and dumb.

He felt the adrenaline rush that had long ago stopped being a significant part of his life but had led him to any number of dangerous decisions along the way. The last thing he needed, just seven hours before he was scheduled to meet Ferendelli, was to get caught down here.

He moved ahead several more feet.

The recessed B-9 doorway was identical in every respect to B-10—brushed steel and high-tech, with thick glass filling the top half. He peered into the brightly lit room, which was another deserted lab, featuring another research apparatus he recognized from his studies of nanotechnology—a scanning electron microscope. The SEM was capable of creating remarkably well-defined images of invisibly tiny nanotubes and fullerenes by bombarding them with a stream of electrons.

The brass plaque beneath the glass read simply: ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. No nameplate. Gabe speculated that Dr. K. Rawdon of the tunneling microscope lab was probably the head of this unit as well.