Free Ghostfinders 02 - Ghost of a Smile by Simon R. Green Page A

out, wherever you are!”
    “I hate it when he does that,” growled Melody, following him in. Happy nodded glumly.
    The Ghost Finders came together in the middle of the lobby and looked around them. Everything was still and quiet, and not in a good way. There was something wrong with the stillness. It was the stillness of anticipation, of something bad about to happen. As though an unspeakable monster was getting ready to jump out at them from some hidden place. As though trap-doors were about to open under their feet, to send them plummeting down to some unimaginable horror. As though all the rules were about to be changed in some terrible game they didn’t even know they were playing.
    “Oh, this is bad,” said Happy. “This feels really bad.”
    “My back is crawling,” said Melody. “Like someone painted a target on it.”
    Kim looked at JC. “What do you feel, sweetie?”
    “Like we’re being watched,” he said. “And I don’t see any security cameras.”
    “The whole place feels like fingernails dragged down the blackboard of my soul,” said Happy. “I can feel someone sneaking up behind me, but there’s no-one there . . .”
    “Yes,” said Melody, trying to look in several directions at once. “Like someone’s crept in and is peering over my shoulder.”
    “Echoes,” JC said calmly. “Psychic echoes of something that’s already happened. Don’t let them get to you. Kim, are you picking up any traces of a stone tape recording? If all these people were killed here, it might have imprinted on the surroundings . . .”
    “It’s worse in here,” said Kim. “It’s been made worse. Bad things happened here, on purpose. Someone walked in blood and murder, and loved it. JC, this whole building is saturated with unnatural energies. Trying to see what happened here is like staring into a spotlight.”
    Melody went straight to the reception desk, sat down before the built-in computer, fired it up, and let out a brief sigh of relief as her fingers tripped busily across the keyboard, teasing and intimidating information out of the computer files.
    “For a really major company, with big-time security protocols, their firewalls are strictly amateur night,” she said smugly.
    “Open up every file you can access,” said JC. “I have questions.”
    “I’m in,” said Melody. “Easy-peasy. What do you want to know?”
    Happy looked at her. “Don’t you need passwords, things like that . . . ?”
    “Passwords are for wimps, too,” said Melody. “You have to know how to talk to these things. Okay . . . They started the latest drug trial last evening. Code name, Zarathustra. Oh shit. That is not good. Whenever some scientist starts quoting Nietzsche, you know it is never going to be good.”
    “‘I teach you the superman,’” JC said solemnly. “He is this thunder, he is this lighting. ‘Man is something that should be overcome.’”
    “Damn,” said Happy. “Are you saying they were trying to make superhumans here? I thought there were a whole bunch of really serious laws against messing around with human DNA?”
    “Oh there are,” said JC. “Lots and lots. Which is why there are also a whole bunch of companies and governments lining up to pay serious money to the first people to come up with something useful. No questions asked. There’s a quiet undeclared race on to produce something that will improve people. Superman, super-soldier, supergenius—all of them property, not people.”
    “There’s nothing here about what this particular drug was supposed to do,” said Melody. “I can’t get into the science laboratories’ files from down here. I need direct access. Which means we need to go further up and poke around . . . I can tell you that the new drug was administered to the volunteers around seven hours ago. So whatever went wrong, it went wrong really fast. I’ve got a list here, names and information on all the volunteers. Are you really a volunteer if they pay you and