Free Pandora's Succession by Russell Brooks Page B

aunt Pauline had planted around the house, back home in St Phillip parish in Barbados. Those were such innocent times for her, when she would share everything with her aunt, whom she owed everything to.
    She never knew her parents. Her mother had passed away a few days after she was born, and her father was a ghost. Aunt Pauline, with the exception of a few other aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in Barbados and England, was the only family that she knew.
    After she passed through the revolving door to the South building, she glanced at the large digital clock that hung above the security guard’s round counter in the center of the atrium. It was 8:35 AM. She was well ahead of schedule. These past several weeks she had played to perfection the role of a senior researcher for Hexagon Pharmaceuticals. On the books, the company had several legitimate research contracts worth millions of dollars. But General Downing sent her there to spy on her boss, Dr. Hideaki Hashimoto.
    The National Security Agency always suspected that illicit human trials were conducted by the Soviets during the Soviet-Afghan war and that they had recruited Hashimoto to run the experiments. Every investigation turned up a dead end. Nevertheless, the NSA’s paranoia led them to believe that if he had perfected his brainwashing techniques, it would likely fall in the hands of an enemy nation or terrorist group.
    Downing felt that her background in biology and chemistry would make her a perfect fit. While she pursued her Biochemistry doctorate at Princeton, she had singlehandedly discovered a bio-weapon threat against the US. Downing wasted no time recruiting her. The CIA and the FBI’s top guns still could not figure out how they overlooked what she saw. To him she was a perfect candidate—no parents and an aunt for a legal guardian.
    But what took her out of the labs at Langley, Virginia, and into the field, was the night she was nearly fatally wounded after a carjacking. It was all because some jerk stood her up on a date. She drove home after waiting for him for over an hour, finally arriving at the traffic light at the DC-Maryland border on Pennsylvania Avenue. It didn’t take too long until she heard someone tapping at her window, only to turn and stare into the barrel of Lorcin 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The next thing she knew, she lost her car and wound up having to be taken to the hospital with a mild concussion.
    The CIA managed to get her into Hexagon, in their San Francisco branch first, until she got herself transferred to West Tokyo’s International Headquarters. Fortunately, she didn’t have to speak Japanese since she worked with bilingual colleagues.
    She got on the horizontal escalator that carried her to the north building where she hopped on the elevator. There was a ping before the doors opened one floor below, to a white hallway with several doors on each side. The strong scent of lemon stung her nostrils as her heels clapped across the recently washed floor. She stopped once she got to the third door on her left, entered, and closed the door behind her.
    She reached to her right and grabbed a lab coat from one of the brass hooks. She removed her jacket and put on the lab coat, leaving her brooch exposed. The events would also be inconspicuously filmed with the miniature camera that was in the brooch pinned to the lapel of her pantsuit. She was there for one reason—to brainwash the two new test subjects with the latest variant of the Clarity drug. After submitting a report, she would meet with her colleague, Tomas Levickis, who was no doubt in his van somewhere doing surveillance as well as recording everything from the brooch.
    To her right was a door to the monitoring station, and the one ahead led to the testing room. Both rooms were separated by a one-way see-through window. She walked ahead, pushed the door open, and saw her two test subjects, Dewan and Eva, and her boss, Dr. Hideaki Hashimoto, as he spoke to