Chapter 34 - The Architect’s Sanctuary
My father had lived here.
Not in the worn-out, two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of town where he drank black coffee and stared at the rain through the kitchen window. *Here.* In this subterranean bunker beneath three feet of reinforced concrete and mountain granite.
The green emergency lights buzzed with an irritating 60-hertz hum. The corridor was flanked by reinforced observation windows looking into pressurized chambers. Behind the cracked glass stood stainless steel examination tables with leather restraints thick enough to hold an elk. Centrifuges, refrigeration racks labeled with barcode serials, and dry-erase boards still covered in complex chemical notations and genetic sequencing trees.
Every single dry-erase board bore my father's distinctive, left-handed slant.
Rex walked slowly down the center of the rubber runner on the floor. His head was down, his nostrils flaring rhythmically as he drank in the scent of the facility. He didn't show fear down here. His demeanor was eerie, almost nostalgic—his tail hanging in a relaxed, confident curve that I had never seen before.
"He raised you here," I whispered to the empty, echoing hall. "You weren't stolen from Campbell. You were born in this tomb."
At the end of the corridor, an airlock door stood half-open, leading into a central control amphitheater.
Inside sat banks of antiquated CRT monitors, reel-to-reel tape machines from the early eighties, and modern high-density server racks blinking with persistent red activity lights. In the middle of the room, positioned directly in front of the master terminal, was a high-backed leather recliner.
Draped over the back of the recliner was my father’s faded olive-drab field jacket.
On the desk sat an empty glass of bourbon, a half-burned cigar dried to ash in a ceramic tray, and a cassette recorder with a piece of blue masking tape across the door.
Written on the tape in black Sharpie was a single word:
May you like
**DONALD.**
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