Just after six o’clock, Charles Scott entered the lab carrying a garment bag in one hand.

“It’s time to change into your work clothes, Mr. Adams,” he said.

They had to walk up a flight of stairs that was hidden behind a locked door before taking a freight elevator to the twelfth floor of the building. Jeremiah was nervous. As the car made its way up, he could feel his stomach fall. Charles Scott and Dr. Pike stood by without a word. Pike held a syringe securely in his right hand. Scott stared at his shoes. When the car stopped and the doors opened, Scott went out first, holding Jeremiah back with an outstretched arm, and surveyed the back hallway in both directions. Satisfied that there was no one in sight, he motioned for Pike and Jeremiah to follow him out. Some two hundred feet to the right was a door that Jeremiah recognized as a supply room. He’d been there only once or twice in over ten years. Typically, it was Brenda’s domain. Scott opened the door and ushered Jeremiah inside.

“Lock the door,” Scott told him. “Dr. Pike and I will head off the clone and, once we have him secured, I will come back here and make the switch. Do not open this door unless you hear my voice. And be quiet. This should only take a minute or two.”

A minute or two might be all the time he’d need, he thought.

When they left, Jeremiah quickly locked the door and looked around. The room was narrow and stifling, without windows. A long table took up much of the floor space, and the walls were lined with shelves containing reams of printer paper, water jugs and a host of things Jeremiah had always taken for granted. Cardboard boxes were stacked up in one corner of the room. He tore at one and found only old printers and a mountain of ink cartridges. Finally, on a high shelf, he saw what he was looking for—spare telephones. He had to climb to reach one and winced when it fell to the floor in a clattering riot. Scrambling back down he picked the thing up and scanned the room for a phone jack so he could plug it in. He saw none. Damn technology, he thought. Much of what the office used now was wireless. He began pulling boxes away from the walls but still couldn’t find a jack.

He heard footsteps in the hallway, coming to a stop just outside the door. He watched the doorknob wriggle and held his breath. It couldn’t be Pike and Scott, he thought. They wouldn’t have tried the door. And there was no way they could have accomplished their task so quickly.

“Now, how did this door get locked?”

Brenda. A fine time for her to fetch a box of pens, he thought. His first instinct was to find a place to hide, but the only obvious place was under the table where he’d be in full view as soon as she walked in. It would have looked absurd if she’d found him there. He took a step backward and braced himself, frantically trying to come up with some reasonable explanation as to why he would have locked himself in the supply room.