Origin by J.A. Konrath, Jack Kilborn Read Free Book Online

came up behind him and punched in the correct code.
    “Thanks,” Andy mumbled.
    He took off down the hall, barely noticing the deep frown of concern on Sun’s face.

D r. Sun Jones wasn’t pleased with herself. She had to stop alienating every man who showed the slightest bit of interest in her. It wasn’t healthy.
    But then she hadn’t felt healthy in quite some time.
    Physically, Sun knew she had more strength and stamina than anyone else in the compound. Even in Africa she’d adhered to her daily exercise regimen of sit-ups and push-ups, receiving more than a few quizzical stares from the indigenous wildlife. Physically, she was a well-tuned machine.
    Emotionally, it was a different story.
    Sun walked down the arm to Red 3 and let herself in. The lights were already on, bright and harsh and making the large space seem more like an operating theater than a records repository.
    Filling the room were dozens of file cabinets, ranging in style from antique oak to modern stainless steel, arranged rank and file like library isles. Off in the corner was a small desk, piled high with the papers she’d been recently reviewing.
    Sun sat in a chair twice her age and tried to focus on the massive amount of work ahead of her. She’d discovered the records room on her second day here, and had been spending all of her free time trying to organize the astounding amount of data it contained.
    Everything about the project was filed here, from the 1907 payroll ledger of the Spanish team who dug the compound (and was then deported back to Spain), up to the arrival of last month’s food shipment. Invoices, reports, inventories, letters, dossiers, Presidential mandates, and even recipes for chicken cacciatore were all haphazardly mixed together with little thought to common sense.
    At one time there may have been some order to the room. Helen Murdoch, Race’s ill wife, had put an end to that. Sun didn’t know the details, but Dr. Belgium had mentioned that years ago Helen had
‘torn Red 3 apart’
, and cleanup had consisted of simply shoving things back into cabinets.
    Sun had wanted to ask Helen about that, and even went so far as to visit her in her room, but the woman was too far gone to remember anything.
    Sad.
    The obvious answer—hire a team to organize everything into a database—had been thought of but deemed unrealistic. Manpower was the only thing the Project lacked. The more people involved, the more likely there would be a security leak, so employment at Samhain was kept bare bones.
    Sun had taken it upon herself to make the task hers. She’d been hired to study Bub in his habitat, based on her experience with large predators. It turned out to be amazingly dull, even though Bub was an extraordinary specimen. Watching a pride of roaming lions was a learning experience. Watching a lion at the zoo was sleep-inducing. Bub simply sat around, as if waiting for something. The only time he became lively was at his feedings, and even that had little variation. The records room gave her an opportunity to be useful.
    Sun had no office experience to speak of, but she had good organization skills, and after only one week her effort was paying off. She’d been chronologically sorting the mountains of paperwork into two main sections, SAMHAIN and BUB . Each of these main topics had a dozen subsections, which would undoubtedly be broken down even further.
    The work was slow going, made even more so by Sun’s inquisitive nature; all too often she would find something particularly fascinating and drift off task. Like the Rosenberg file.
    It traced the hiring of an independent engineering firm called G & R to improve upon the compound’s emergency generator in 1951. The hirees, one Julius Rosenberg and one David Greenglas, snooped where they shouldn’t have and actually tried to blackmail President Truman.
    Truman didn’t go for it, and the two, along with Rosenberg’s wife Ethyl, were executed for treason on less than authentic