“I don’t see the point.” Hanging the diplomas wasn’t Kate’s style and even if it were, who would she impress with them? Kate was the only investigator and physician on the study, and all the staff knew her CV. They received no visitors, and the only other people who saw her office were the two dozen staff who cared for the autistic children in the study. The staff would think Stanford and Johns Hopkins were people, long deceased relatives maybe, the diplomas perhaps their birth certificates.
“I’d put it up, if I had an MD from Johns Hopkins.” Ben carefully placed the diploma back in the box and rummaged around in it some more.
Kate drained the last of the coffee. “Yeah?” She held the cup out. “I’ll trade you for another cup of coffee.”
“Does this mean I can give you orders now?”
“Don’t get carried away,” Kate said as Ben left the room. She stood and twisted the hard plastic cylinder that controlled the blinds, revealing a view of the chain-link fence that circled their building and beyond it, the crowded streets of Jakarta. The morning commute was in full swing. Buses and cars crept along as motorcycles darted in and out of the tight spaces between them. Bicycles and pedestrians filled every square inch of the sidewalks. And she had thought the traffic in San Francisco was bad.
It wasn’t just the traffic. Jakarta still felt so foreign to her. It wasn’t home. Maybe it never would be. Four years ago, Kate would have moved anywhere in the world, any place that wasn’t San Francisco. Martin Grey, her adoptive father, had said, “Jakarta would be a great place to continue your research… and… to start over.” He had also said something about time healing all wounds. But now she was running out of time.
She turned back to the desk and began clearing away the photos Ben had taken out. She stopped at a faded picture of a large dancing room with a parquet floor. How had it gotten in with her work things? It was the only photo she had of her childhood home in West Berlin, just off Tiergartenstraße. Kate could barely picture the massive three-story residence. In her memory, it felt more like a foreign embassy or a grand estate from another time. A castle. An empty castle. Kate’s mother had died during childbirth, and while her father had been loving, he had rarely been present. Kate tried to picture him in her mind’s eye, but she couldn’t. There was only a vague recollection of a cold day in December when he had taken her for a walk. She remembered how tiny her hand felt inside of his, how safe she felt. They had walked all the way down Tiergartenstraße, to the Berlin Wall. It was a somber scene: families placing wreaths and pictures, hoping and praying for the Wall to fall and their loved ones to return. The other memories were flashes of him leaving and returning, always with some trinket from a far-away place. The house staff had taken up the slack as best they could. They were attentive but perhaps a little cold. What was the housekeeper’s name? Or the tutor who lived with her and the other staff on the top floor? She had taught Kate German. She could still speak German, but she couldn’t remember the woman’s name.
About the only clear memory of the first six years of her life was the night Martin came into her dance room, turned the music off, and told her that her father wasn’t coming home — ever again — and that she would be coming to live with him.
She wished she could erase that memory, and she’d just as soon forget the thirteen years that followed. She had moved to America with Martin, but the cities ran together as he rushed off to one expedition after another and she was shipped off to one boarding school after another. None of them ever felt like home either.
Her research lab. It was the closest thing she had ever had to a real home. She spent every waking moment there. She had thrown herself into her work after San Francisco, and what had started as a defense mechanism, a survival mechanism, had become her routine, her lifestyle. The research team had become her family and the research participants her children.
And it was all about to go away.
She needed to focus. And she needed more coffee. She pushed the pile of photos off the desk and into the box below. Where was Ben?
Kate walked out into the hall and made her way to the staff kitchen. Empty. She checked the coffee pot. Empty. The strobe lights were going off here too.
Something was wrong. “Ben,” Kate called out.
The other research staff wouldn’t be in for hours. They kept a strange schedule, but they did good work. Kate cared more about the work.
She ventured out into the research wing, which consisted of a series of storage rooms and offices surrounding a large cleanroom lab where Kate and her team engineered gene therapy retroviruses they hoped would cure autism. She peered through the glass. Ben wasn’t in the lab.
The building was creepy at this time of morning. It was empty, quiet, and not quite dark, but not light either. Shafts of focused sunlight poured into the hallways from the windows in the rooms on each side, like search lights probing for signs of life.
Kate’s footfalls echoed loudly as she prowled the cavernous research wing, peeking into each room, squinting to see through the bright Jakartan sun. All empty. That left the residential section — the housing units, kitchens, and supporting facilities for the study’s roughly 100 autistic children.
In the distance, Kate could hear other footsteps, faster than hers — running. She began walking more quickly, in their direction, and just as she turned the corner, Ben reached out and grabbed her arm. “Kate! Follow me, hurry.”
CHAPTER 2
Manggarai Train Station
Jakarta, Indonesia
David Vale stepped back into the shadow of the train station’s ticket counter. He studied the man buying a New York Times from the newsstand. The man paid the vendor, then walked past the trash can without throwing the paper away. Not the contact.
Behind the newsstand, a commuter train crept into the station. It was packed to the walls with Indonesian workers coming into the capital from the outlying cities for the day’s work. Passengers hung out of every set of sliding double doors, middle-aged men mostly. On the roof of the train, teenagers and young adults sat, squatted, and stretched out, reading newspapers, fiddling with smart phones, and talking. The crowded commuter train was a symbol of Jakarta itself, a city bursting at the seams with a growing population struggling to modernize. Mass transit was only the most visible sign of the city’s struggle to accommodate the 28 million people in its metro area.
The commuters were fleeing the train now, swarming the station like shoppers on Black Friday in America. It was chaos. Workers pushed, shoved, and shouted as they ran out the station’s doors, while others fought to get into the station. This happened here and in other commuter train stations throughout the city every day. It was the perfect place for a meet.