Read Online Placebo by Steven James - Free Book Online Page B

eyeing the line of doors to our right. “So, do you know where it is?”
    â€œThird floor. North wing, east side, end of the hall.”
    She stares at me. “How do you know that?”
    With my flashlight I motion for her to follow me, and we head toward the stairwell. “In the LRC brochure, there was a photo of a researcher monitoring someone who appears to be resting on a reclining chair. Right?”
    â€œSure. That was the sender.”
    â€œExactly. The person who’s supposed to be transmitting loving thoughts—good energy, that sort of thing.”
    â€œBe nice, dear. That’s going to be your job tomorrow. I don’t want any negative vibes coming from you.” She thinks for a moment. “But I don’t understand the significance of that picture. The guy in the photo isn’t in the chamber. So how can you tell where it is?”
    We reach the stairs. Start to climb to the third floor. “Beyond him is a window. You can see trees outside the glass, but neither the tree trunks nor the canopy are visible. The forest is on this building’s eastside. Also, based on the relatively uniform height of the forest canopy behind us, I’m guessing that the floor the chamber is on—”
    â€œAh, I get it. The third story.”
    â€œYes. And from the journal articles, we know that the distance between the sender and receiver is 120 feet. I’m anticipating that the easiest way to measure the distance would be if the chamber were on the same floor as the sender’s room. Also, as we approached the building, I saw windows uniformly placed on the west side of the wing, but the room with the Faraday cage wouldn’t have any. So, based on all those factors, including the length of the hall, the chamber will be located on the third floor, north wing, east side, at the far end of the hallway.”
    At the top of the stairs Charlene pauses. “There were blueprints in the material Fionna sent you, weren’t there, Sherlock?”
    I clear my throat slightly. “Come on. It’s down here to the left.”

    Glenn arrived at the building, picked the lock of the first floor’s exit door, and stepped inside.
    Now to find the computer with the files.
    Knife in one hand, flashlight in the other, he started down the hallway.

    As Cyrus and Riah swung into a gas station on the way to Bridgeport, Riah couldn’t help but wonder about this meeting with the twins. As the lead researcher on the team, she should have been notified that they were back in town.
    After all, she was the one looking at ways of recording and electrically stimulating neural activity in the brain’s language recognition center—in the Wernicke’s area of the temporal lobe. Before a person speaks, neural signals command the body to produce those vocal sounds. She was the one searching for ways to decipher the signals and correlate them to specific linguistic patterns.
    So. Questions.
    Why hadn’t she been told?
    Why was Cyrus meeting with them after hours at the R&D complex?
    And what was that phone conversation of his about: “We have a man in the area . . . He’s good, he’ll take care of everything . . . By tomorrow afternoon it won’t be a problem”?
    She had the sense that something dealing with the research had gone unexpectedly wrong.
    Or maybe something has gone unexpectedly right.
    Cyrus guided the Jag back onto the highway, and she took note of her boss’s demeanor. Over the last four months she’d grown good at reading him, and though he always looked focused, intense, now she thought he looked a bit ill at ease. Nervous? Possibly. But something else too.
    Afraid?
    Hard to say.
    She would watch him closely, note his reaction when they met up with the twins at the R&D facility, and see what that might tell her about what was going on.

The Faraday Cage
    The door to the room containing the Faraday cage, or anechoic