PART I:
JAKARTA BURNING
CHAPTER 1
Autism Research Center (ARC)
Jakarta, Indonesia
Present Day
Dr. Kate Warner awoke to a terrifying feeling: there was someone in the room. She tried to open her eyes but couldn’t. She felt groggy, almost as though she had been drugged. The air was musty… subterranean. She twisted slightly and pain coursed through her. The bed below her was hard, a couch maybe; definitely not the bed in her 19th floor condo in downtown Jakarta. Where was she?
She heard another quiet footfall, like tennis shoes on carpet. “Kate,” a man whispered, testing to see if she was awake.
Kate managed to open her eyes a little more. Above her, faint rays of sunlight filtered in through metal blinds that covered short, wide windows. In the corner, a strobe light pierced the room every few seconds, like the flash of a camera snapping a photo incessantly.
She took a deep breath and sat up quickly, seeing the man for the first time. He reeled back, dropping something that clanged as brown liquid splashed on the floor.
It was Ben Adelson, her lab assistant. “Jesus, Kate. I’m sorry. I thought… if you were up, you might want coffee.” He bent to pick up the remnants of a shattered coffee cup, and when he got a closer look at her, he said, “God, you look like hell, Kate.” He stared at her for a moment. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
Kate rubbed her eyes, and her head seemed to clear a bit as she realized where she was. She had been working at the lab day and night for the last five days, virtually nonstop since she had gotten the call from her research sponsor: produce results now, any results, or the funding goes away. No excuses this time. She hadn’t told any of the staff on her autism study. There was no reason to worry them. Either she got some results, and they went on or she didn’t, and they went home. “Coffee sounds nice, Ben. Thanks.”
The man exited the van and pulled his black face mask down. “Use your knife inside. Gunfire will draw attention.”
His assistant, a woman, nodded and pulled her face mask down as well.
The man extended his gloved hand to the door, then hesitated. “You’re sure the alarm is off?”
“Yeah. Well, I cut the outside line, but it’s probably going off inside.”
“What?” He shook his head. “Jesus — they could be calling it in right now. Let’s move.” He threw the door open and charged inside.
Above the door, a sign read:
Autism Research Center
Staff Entrance
Ben returned with a fresh cup of coffee, and Kate thanked him. He plopped down in a chair opposite her desk. “You’re going to work yourself to death. You’ve slept here for the past four nights. And the secrecy, banning everyone from the lab, hoarding your notes, not talking about ARC-247. I’m not the only one who’s worried.”
Kate sipped the coffee. Jakarta had been a difficult place to run a clinical trial, but working on the island of Java had some bright spots. The coffee was one of them.
She couldn’t tell Ben what she was doing in the lab, at least not yet. It might amount to nothing, and more than likely, they were all out of a job anyway. Involving him would only make him an accomplice to a possible crime.
Kate nodded to the flashing fixture in the corner of the room. “What’s that strobe light?”
Ben glanced over his shoulder at it. “Not sure. An alarm, I think—”
“Fire?”
“No. I made rounds when I got here, it’s not a fire. I was about to do a thorough inspection when I noticed that your door was cracked.” Ben reached into one of the dozen cardboard boxes that crowded Kate’s office. He flipped through a few framed diplomas. “Why don’t you put these up?”
“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 Tiergartenstra?e. 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 Tiergartenstra?e, 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.”