Lasher by Anne Rice

his plane for New Orleans left at eight-thirty. He did not have a moment to waste.
    He flashed his identification card for the guard, who at once called up to verify the information, and then let him through with a nod.
    Once again, in front of the elevator, he had to identify himself—this time to a woman’s voice strangled by a tiny speaker beneath a video camera. Lark hated it, being seen but unable to see who saw.
    The elevator carried him soundlessly and quickly up the fifteen floors to Mitchell Flanagan’s laboratory. And within seconds, he had found the door, seen the light behind the smoked glass and knocked hard.
    “Lark here, Mitchell,” he said in answer to a murmur on the other side.
    Mitchell Flanagan looked the way he always did, half blind and utterly incompetent, peering at Lark through thick wire-rimmed glasses, his thatch of yellow hair the perfect wig for a scarecrow, his lab coat dusty but miraculously unstained.
    Rowan’s favorite genius, thought Lark. Well, I was her favorite surgeon. So why am I so jealous? His crush on Rowan Mayfair was dying hard. So what if she’d gone south, gotten married and was now embroiled in some frightening medical mayhem? He’d really wanted to get her into bed, and he never had.
    “Come inside,” said Mitch, apparently resisting the urge to pull Lark right into the carpeted corridor, where strings of tiny white lights softly outlined both the ceiling and the floor.
    This place could drive me mad, Lark thought. You really expect to open a door and find human beings in antiseptic cages.
    Mitch led the way—past the numerous steel doors with their small lighted windows, behind which various electronic noises could be heard.
    Lark knew better than to ask to be admitted to these inner sanctums. Genetic research was entirely secret at Keplinger, even to most of the medical community. This private interview with Mitchell Flanagan had been bought and paid for by Rowan Mayfair—or the Mayfair family at any rate—at an exorbitant price.
    Mitchell led Lark into a large office, with huge glass windows open to the crowded buildings of Lower California Street and a sudden dramatic view of the Bay Bridge. Sheer drapery, rather like mosquito netting, was fixed to the long chromepoles over the windows, masking and softening the night, and making it seem to Lark even more close and rather terrible. His memories of San Francisco before the era of the high-rise were simply too clear. The bridge looked totally out of proportion, and surely misplaced.
    A wall of computer screens rose on one side of the large mahogany desk. Mitchell took the high-backed chair facing Lark and gestured for him to be seated in the more comfortable upholstered chair before the desk. The fabric was the color of claret, a heavy silk probably, and the style of the furnishings was vaguely oriental. Either that, or there was no style at all.
    Beneath the windows, and their spectacle of the frightening night, stood rows and rows of file drawers, each with its own digital coded lock. The rug was the same deep claret as the chair in which Lark had made himself comfortable. Other chairs here and there were done up in the same color so that they all but vanished into the floor or into the darkly paneled walls.
    The top of the desk was blank. Behind Mitchell’s head of scarecrow hair was a great abstract painting that resembled nothing so much as a spermatozoon swimming like mad to a fertilized egg. It was wonderfully colored, however—full of cobalt and burning orange and neon green—as if painted by a Haitian artist who, having stumbled upon a drawing of sperm and egg in a scientific journal, had chosen it for a model, never guessing or caring what it was.
    The office reeked of wealth. The Keplinger Institute reeked of wealth. It was reassuring that Mitch looked sloppy, incapable and even a little dirty—a mad scientist who made no concessions to corporate or scientific tyranny. He had not shaved in at least