Page 3 of A Time & Place for Every Laird (A Laird for All Time #2)

“Claire? Hello?”

Claire looked up to find her friend Darcy Washington looking down at her with a frown. “You’ve got a mark on your forehead, you know?”

Darcy continued when Claire didn’t speak.

Reaching up, Claire rubbed her forehead. Of course she had a spot there. She’d been face down on her desk, numbed with shock over her recent encounter.

“Come on, girl! It’s time for lunch.”

Claire blinked up at her friend and then at the clock in surprise. For more than an hour, she’d been trying to figure out what Dr. Fielding might possibly be working on that had him keeping specimens of any sort in his lab, let alone human ones, but so far had been unable to even hypothesize a single logical explanation. Mark-Davis Laboratories was awash with top-secret activities, but in reality most of them weren’t that big a mystery to those working on campus.

Grabbing her purse, Claire rose and trailed her friend out of the building before coming alongside Darcy. Like fictional Eureka, Mark-Davis was a sprawling campus rather than just one building. Since the higher-ups preferred to keep their employees from having reason to leave work, there were places to eat, a gym with a swimming pool, day care facilities, a small medical office, and even a post office housed within the corporate confines. Inside the dozen buildings there was a honeycomb of sectors working on everything from ballistics to bombs.

Claire’s sector worked in the development of ultrasonic weaponry, or USW. USWs employed focused beams of sound as a weapon in the form of bullets, grenades, or mines. This was one of the many projects helping to make science fiction into science fact.

As they walked down the sidewalk and around a tiny park surrounded by buildings on their way to the cafeteria, she continued to rub her forehead, trying to rationalize what she had seen, but still couldn’t think of a single project in the works that used animal testing … or human. Of course there were many levels of security clearance at play in the company, but regardless of the secrecy of any project in the works, there was always some gossip in the company cafeteria. Whatever secrets Fielding was keeping, he was keeping them well.

Still, Claire couldn’t help but ask Darcy if she’d heard anything. “I suppose you think Todd probably said something,”

Darcy grimaced, referring to her former boyfriend, who worked in Fielding’s sector.

“Did he?”

“Just pillow talk,”

Darcy confessed in a whisper. “Todd never told me exactly what they’re working on but I do know that whatever it is, they are failing miserably. Billions of dollars given to them by INSCOM and nothing to show for it.”

“INSCOM?”

“Army Intelligence and Security Command,”

her friend explained the acronym. “I know, I had never heard of them either but apparently they’re like the black ops of Army intelligence. Todd said Fielding’s so afraid of losing his funding that each night at Riley’s he cries like a baby into his beer. That’s what you get for putting an astrophysicist in charge of a weapons division, I say.”

Claire wasn’t interested in Fielding’s decline into academic depression, however. “He never said anything else?”

“Just that it had something to do with surveillance, I think.”

Darcy shrugged as they entered the cafeteria building, which was similar to a shopping mall food court, with several different choices of foods. There was a grill with burgers and chicken; a bistro with soups, sandwiches, and the like; a bakery with fresh bagels, donuts, and pastries for early morning arrivers; a new sushi bar that had opened just the week before; and even a Starbucks. Claire and Darcy went by rote to the bistro’s salad bar, picking up trays, plates, and utensils.

“Surveillance?”

Surveillance in military-speak often translated to spying, and with the project being funded by this INSCOM that made sense, but even so, how would that result in a lab full of caged beings? Claire scooped up a small amount of baby spinach onto her plate with a wrinkled nose. It was repugnance that gnawed at her stomach now, not hunger, at the thought that a botched experiment – whatever it might be – had led to the incarceration of human beings.

“Yes,”

Darcy nodded. “Why do you want to know?”

Shaking her head, Claire halfheartedly tossed on some mushrooms and a little vinaigrette. “I’m really freaked out, Darcy.”

“That much is abundantly clear,”

Darcy quipped. “The question is why?”

They paid for their meals at the register and went to their usual table near the windows. In the distance, Claire could see the mountains of the coastal ranges in Washington State. Even in May they were covered in snow. Clean and pure compared to the unethical practices she’d just uncovered.

Glancing around, Claire answered in low tones, “I was in Dr. Fielding’s lab today and saw some … animals there.”

“What were you doing over there?”

was the first thing Darcy wanted to know.

“I was getting coffee this morning,”

Claire explained, gesturing toward the Starbucks numbly. “I was talking with Marcia – do you know Marcia? – anyway, she got a call from her son’s school saying that he was running a fever, and asking her to come pick him up. She had a stack of files with her and asked me to drop them off in Dr. Fielding’s office so she could leave right away.”

“She shouldn’t have done that,”

Darcy pointed out, only to receive Claire’s arch look that mutely stated, "no kidding" in response. “Fine. No lecture. What kind of animals are we talking here? Lab mice?”

Darcy speared a green pepper before popping it in her mouth but Claire only nudged her salad around her plate.

“Bigger,”

she mumbled. “What could he possibly be doing that he would need … specimens?”

“Specimens?”

Darcy asked with more focused curiosity. “More than mice?”

Claire snorted softly and glumly nodded her head.

“Bunnies?”

Darcy’s voice had taken on an edge of hope that Claire knew was little more than denial rearing its head. It was nothing compared to the misery that had been eating at Claire. She’d never considered herself an ardent humanitarian before. She cried for the troubles in other countries, the poor, the hungry, but thought America had enough troubles of its own to focus on. She gave to St. Jude’s and to the Wounded Warriors Project, volunteered her time at the local animal shelter, and did what she could to be the change she wanted to see in the world, but had always inwardly acknowledged that the influence of one person was negligible in changing the fate of many – animals or human.

For the first time, she wanted to truly save someone – someone specific. She needed to do it. This went beyond wrongful imprisonment. Those men! Claire couldn’t even contemplate how they had come to be there, but neither one of them probably had a clue as to what had happened to them.

“Not just bunnies, Darcy.”

Claire nudged her salad around with her fork again before pushing the plate away. “There are men in that lab. Two of them.”

“Men?”

Darcy squeaked, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “Like, human men?”

“Are there any other kind? But not just like the guy next door. One is an Indian. A Native American. You should see him.”

Claire paused. “Darcy, there’s no way he’s from… here.”

“Here, as in Washington?”

“No, here, as in now,”

Claire said, voicing the truth that was becoming clear to her, no matter how preposterous it sounded. “He’s from a different time. He has to be. No one, not the most brilliant costume designer in the world, could come up with something like that.”

“That’s ridiculous, Claire,”

Darcy protested before digging back into her salad. “You’re talking about time travel? It isn’t possible.”

“Really?”

Claire scoffed. “Would a time machine really be the most unbelievable thing that came out of this place? Your projects are right up there with Star Trek, aren’t they? Why not something out of Dr. Who?”

Darcy’s team was developing the next generation of orbital weaponry – weapons effective in the vacuum of outer space, should the world ever come to that. Naturally, that division’s work was all supposed to be limited to theoretical development, as the United Nations had banned the militarization and weaponization of outer space long ago.

“Come on, Claire!”

“Come on, Darcy!”

Claire shot back, her heart pounding desperately against her chest. “He has them locked up in cages, the Indian and the other one …”

Claire drifted off picturing the larger man, the one whose emotional stare had affected her so. “I think he’s Scottish or something. It’s hard to tell. He’s all bloody and mangy looking. But even if he is a medieval savage, he doesn’t deserve being locked up like that. He has them in cages, Darcy! Wallowing in their own filth! This is bigger than the ACLU or PETA here. We need to do something!”

Wide-eyed, Darcy shook her head in denial. “We? No, no, no. Claire, I need this job. I can’t afford to do something stupid.”

“Stupid?”

Claire asked incredulously. “It’s not stupid to save a life.”

“Oh, Claire,”

the other woman moaned. “You know the kind of security they have in there. There’s just no way.”

“I know.”

And she did. Hadn’t she thought the same, back in Dr. Fielding’s lab? But what else could she do? Just stand aside and let the men rot in those cells? “There must be something, some authority we could report it to.”

“Really?”

Darcy scoffed at that. “If these two men are really from another time – and I’m not saying they are – who do you think would take them without treating them like a science experiment?”

Darcy had a point there and Claire knew it.

“Go home, Claire,”

Darcy said then, aware that she had finally given her friend something to think about. “Get out of here before you do something stupid. After a good night’s sleep you’ll realize that you just need to keep your head down and forget about what you saw.”

“I can’t just forget.”

“You had better, and don’t you be calling the ACLU!”