The Forgotten Room: A Novel

by Lincoln Child

  “What is it you want to inherit, Laura?” Logan asked. “Ruin, madness, death? Listen: I’ll bet you haven’t spent much time really thinking about how this would end—about the damage this research would cause if placed in the wrong hands. It’s true—your grandfather, and by extension yourself, have accomplished something remarkable. But if you’d take a moment to step back, to see the ethical reality of the situation, you’ll know that this isn’t the way.”

  Ahead, the metal of the secure barrier came into view. As Logan spoke, Benedict slowed, then stopped. “I was wrong,” she said quietly, without looking back.

  She paused, her thin body rocking slightly. And then she began walking again.

  “Yes,” Logan said as they came up to the barrier and she unlocked the door with a quick punch of her fingers over the keypad. “But, Laura, given what happened to your grandfather, I understand. What happened to him, to the others, was awful—shameful. And yet Lux was right to stop their work. Do you see now why you can’t go ahead with this? Why the research must end? Why you can’t involve Ironhand in these secrets?”

  Benedict stepped through the doorway.

  “I meant,” she said, punching in a sequence on the keypad beyond the barrier, “I was wrong about you.”

  Before Logan could react, the security door clamped shut, sealing him in.

  “It was a mistake to try saving you,” she said through the ventilation tubes. “They were right all along.”

  Logan grasped the door and shook it, but it was immovable. As he watched, Benedict picked up an internal wall phone and dialed. “Where are you?” she spoke into the phone. “First-floor library? I’m almost directly below you, at the barrier to the secure labs. Logan’s inside.” A pause. “Yes. Come right away. I’ll meet you at the staircase, give you the entrance code. Do what you have to do, but I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  She replaced the phone. Then she looked at Logan, gave him a regretful smile. “I’m sorry it had to end like this, Dr. Logan. You seemed like a good person. I wanted you to run. But I can see now that never would have worked.” She lowered her voice. “Their way, unfortunately, is the only way.”

  Then she turned and began walking briskly down the corridor, in the direction of the central staircase.

  47

  For a moment, Logan simply watched through the Plexiglas window as Benedict walked away. He felt stunned with surprise. And then—with a sudden motion born more out of instinct than reason—he wheeled around and began running back down the cold, steel-clad corridor as quickly as he could.

  After a moment he paused midcorridor. He’d never get out if he just ran blindly. More slowly now, he continued, jiggling the knobs of the doors as he passed, opening those that were unlocked and turning on the interior lights to create the illusion that someone might be inside. Time was his enemy; he had to buy as much of it as he could.

  Just as he reached the T intersection at the end of the corridor, he heard a low beep as the security door was unlocked.

  Logan ducked around the corner, breathing hard. Under the pitiless glare of the corridor lighting, he felt like a rat in a maze. He heard low voices in the distance and the crackle of a radio.

  Taking a deep breath, he pressed himself against the wall, venturing a quick glance back around the corner. Some thirty yards down the hall, he saw three men. They were advancing slowly, looking into the open doors as they advanced. Each held a radio in one hand, and in the other something that Logan suspected to be a Taser. One of the men was wearing a tweed jacket. As he moved, his jacket swept back to reveal the glint of a handgun.

  Logan pulled back. Three men.

  As quietly as he could, he moved down this new corridor—opening doors and turning on lights whenever he could—and then ducked around another bend. He was approaching Benedict’s lab now. Ahead on the right was a lab marked KARISHMA, its door ajar. He slipped inside and looked around quickly. It appeared to be a chemical laboratory of some kind, festooned with workstations, glassware in wooden racks, mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and other tools he couldn’t begin to recognize. There were also whiteboards, a conference table, and the same Aeron chairs he’d seen in Laura Benedict’s office.

  Closing and locking the door, he looked around again, imprinting the layout of the room onto his memory. Then he turned out the lights and made his way carefully back to a far corner, where he crouched between a pair of metal bookshelves.

  He couldn’t just continue to run like a fox from the hounds. He had to think this through.

  Three men. Ironhand security, perhaps, or at the least hired muscle. These were the people, he felt certain, who’d burned Pam Flood alive in her own house. No doubt they were also the men in the big SUV that had tried to run his car off the road and into the ocean—there was no longer any thought of that being a mere accident. These men were here to kill him.

  So why were they carrying Tasers? Would there be fewer questions later if his body wasn’t full of bullet holes? He shook off the thought.

  In the dark, Logan quietly slipped his satchel from his shoulder and began rummaging through it, searching for anything useful. His hand closed over a small but powerful flashlight; he slipped this into a pocket of his jacket. His cell phone went into a pants pocket. He also pocketed the digital recorder with Benedict’s unwitting confession. A Swiss army knife with half a dozen gadgets he’d never used went into still another pocket. Nothing else in the backpack—cameras, notebooks, EM sensors, trifield monitors—seemed of any use. He owned a handgun, but it was locked in a gun safe back in his house in Stony Creek—regrettably, it hadn’t seemed a necessary accessory for a trip to a prominent think tank.

  Out of habit, he slipped the near-empty satchel back over his right shoulder. Then he froze as he saw—through the screened-glass window of the laboratory door—a shadow approaching. A moment later, one of the three men appeared. He wore a waxed waterproof jacket and a cap set low over his ears. As Logan watched, the man stopped just outside the chemistry lab, pulled out a radio, and spoke quietly into it. He listened for a moment, then put the radio away. A Taser was still at the ready. He tried the door to Logan’s hiding place, and—finding it locked—continued down the corridor.

  Logan let the air slowly escape from his lungs. The men must have split up as they reached the fork in the corridor.

  He crouched in the darkness, thinking. There had to be an emergency exit somewhere. He thought back to his first trip down these hallways with Laura Benedict, just twenty minutes earlier, but he didn’t recall seeing anything like another way out….

  His cell phone. He could call the police. Better yet, he could call Lux security—he had the number programmed into his phone and they would likely still be on site.

  He plucked the phone from his pocket, began to dial—then saw the NO SERVICE message on the display. He was too deep into the basement, and the walls were too thick, to pick up a signal.

  But Benedict had called him from down here. No doubt each lab had a telephone, hardwired to a landline. He could use that.

  Rising from his hiding place, he pulled the flashlight from his pocket, cupped his hand over it to shield the beam, shone it around the lab. There: to the right of the door, on a small table, sat a phone with a dozen buttons embedded in its faceplate.

  He waited a moment, making sure all was quiet in the corridor outside. Then, moving slowly, using the rectangle of light from the window in the door as a guide, he approached the phone, reached for it.

  As he did so, his right elbow brushed against a large, empty glass beaker, set into a wooden stand. There was a protest of old wood; the beaker wobbled; and then—before he could react—the stand broke into two pieces and the beaker crashed to the ground with a sound like thunder.

  Christ. For a moment, Logan froze. Then—as quickly as he could—he opened the door, locked it from the inside, closed it again, and darted across the hall into another lab. He’d already turned on the lights here, and he
didn’t dare turn them off. The room was damnably bare—just some bookshelves and a computer, but at least it was free of glassware—and he ducked under the central table.

  Seconds later he heard the sound of running feet approaching from farther down the corridor. It was the man who had been here just moments earlier. From Logan’s vantage point beneath the table, he saw the man’s feet as they paused outside the door. They pivoted this way and that. Logan didn’t dare breathe.

  Then came the sound of a radio.

  “Control to Variable One, give me a sitrep,” a voice crackled.

  “Variable One,” the man in the corridor said. “I’m near the source of the noise.”

  “Anything?”

  “Negative.”

  “Keep looking. He must be close. And shoot only as a last resort.”

  “Roger that.” This was followed by a metallic clicking noise. For an agonizing moment, the man stood in the corridor, waiting, listening. And then—slowly, stealthily—he moved on down the hallway, back in the direction of the T intersection.

  Logan waited: a minute, two minutes, five. He didn’t dare wait any longer; at some point the man would return, probably with the other two.

  Emerging from beneath the table, Logan crept silently to the door, then paused again, listening. He hazarded a glance into the corridor, which was empty. He slipped out, past Benedict’s now-empty lab, until he reached another intersection. This, too, was deserted. But it made him nervous: if all these various corridors were interconnected, the chance of meeting up with one of his pursuers—either from ahead or from behind—increased dramatically.

  He darted left and trotted quickly down the hall, opening doors and turning on lights as he went. Reaching another bend, he peered carefully around it—empty—then proceeded around the corner.

  There it was: perhaps twenty yards ahead, the corridor ended in another steel door. Above it glowed a red EXIT sign.

  Moving as fast as he could, making no further attempt to conceal his footsteps, Logan ran toward the door. Just as he reached it, movement sounded from behind. Slipping the satchel off his shoulder, Logan threw it into the open doorway of a nearby computer lab as a diversion, causing a tremendous racket, but it was too late—as he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the man in the waterproof jacket at the bend in the corridor, yelling into his radio and sprinting in his direction.

  Logan opened the door at the end of the hall with the EXIT sign above it—the door was labeled BRONSTEIN—then dashed inside, closed and locked it behind him, and looked around quickly. This was clearly some kind of physics laboratory, its tables covered with spectroscopes, digital strobes, microburners, and something that looked, most bizarrely, like an oversize timpani mallet stood on end, surrounded by a chicken-wire enclosure.

  At the far end of the lab was another door. This, too, was marked with a red EXIT sign.

  Behind Logan, the doorknob rattled as it was tried from the far side. This was followed by a heavy thud.

  Skirting the lab tables and equipment shelves, Logan raced across the floor and opened the far door. There was a short corridor beyond, its walls bare save for a large ventilation grate set near the floor. At the end was still another steel door.

  Beside it, mounted on the wall, was a security keypad.

  He ran forward and tried the door anyway, hoping against hope. It was securely locked.

  Logan took a step back, then another, almost dazed by this bad luck. He glanced over his shoulder, across the physics lab, to the window of the door he had locked. He could see the man in the waterproof jacket throwing himself against it, again and again. The Taser in his hand had been replaced by an automatic weapon. A silencer had been snugged into the end of its barrel.

  Logan stood there, frozen, as the pounding continued. Now the man was being joined by the others, and he could hear the sound of overlapping voices. And still he could not move.

  There was no way out. He was trapped.

  48

  Logan stood in the open doorway, surveying the lab. At the far end, through the security glass, he could see the three men attempting to force the door open. He had only seconds until they were through.

  The overhead lights dimmed; brightened; dimmed again—the full fury of the storm must be on them now. As the lights once again returned to normal, he looked around the lab in desperation. There was the phone: fixed to the wall…on the far side of the lab, near the door he’d locked. Near the men, desperately trying to get in.

  Could he get to it in time?

  As he stood, frozen in place, one of the men pulled out his gun and aimed it at the door lock. The sound of the shot reached him as a sharp crump.

  At the same time, Logan’s gaze fell on the strange device he’d noticed earlier: the oversized timpani mallet. He peered at it more closely as another shot sounded. It consisted of a spherical metal ball atop a red plastic belt, the belt looking almost like the ribbon cable of a personal computer, fastened at the base to what appeared to be a comb-shaped electrode. The entire thing was encased in a wire cage.

  It was familiar. He’d seen something like it before.

  A third shot sounded. With the whine of a ricochet, part of the door lock spun back into the room, leaving a small, ragged hole.

  Logan did his best to ignore this as he stared at the device. Where had he seen this?

  And then he remembered. It had been at a Yale freshman fraternity rush, back before the practice was banned. An electrical engineering club had exhibited just such a device: its metal globe had shot out sparks in all directions, eliciting shrieks and cries and making people’s hair stand on end.

  A Van de Graaff generator. That’s what it was called. And that wire enclosure: it was exactly like the Faraday cage Kim Mykolos had speculated about, in the faceplates of the suits hanging in the forgotten room. What was it she’d said? An enclosure, made of a conducting mesh, that ensures the electrical voltage on both sides remains constant.

  A fourth shot. This one had the effect of knocking out the rest of the lock, sending it scudding across the floor.

  Logan was thinking furiously, cursing the time he’d spent as a junior, snoozing through Dr. Wallace’s physics course. The cage surrounding the Van de Graaff generator—it acted as a protective device. If the generator was turned on, and the cage removed, the generator would produce a rapid buildup of negative electrons….

  He rushed up to the lab table. Knocking away the surrounding cage, he saw the device was powered by two small white wires and a toggle switch inserted into the base. The wires led away to a standard electrical plug, which he picked up and slid into an outlet in the side of the lab table. Nothing happened. He pressed the toggle switch. It must have acted as a fail-safe mechanism, because immediately the generator came to life, humming and vibrating. He fell back, ducking down into the doorway and out of harm’s way. As he did so, the door at the far end of the lab flew open with a violent slam.

  As the three men stormed into the room, the Van de Graaff generator went crazy; freed of the restraining mesh, it began shooting out bolts of lightning in every direction, glancing off metal chairs and tables and racks of equipment, the blue and yellow tongues licking their way up the walls in uncontrolled, spastic gestures.

  The men paused a moment, staring at the awesome display of electricity streaming out in a hundred jagged lines from the metal sphere. Then one of them—the man in the waterproof jacket—stepped gingerly forward. Quick as a striking snake, a jumping, dancing bolt of electricity shot out from the generator and almost encircled him. His body jerked for a moment under the current, and then he fell to the ground, temporarily stunned.

  Logan backed away still farther, out of the lab and into the short hallway. It was as he’d hoped: with the generator running, the constant stream of negative electrons it produced would jump to any conducting material…for example, a human body.

  “Thank you, Dr. Wallace,” he murmured. One down, two to go…

  Suddenly, silen
tly, the lights went out.

  For a moment, Logan remained in stasis, uncertain of what had happened. Almost instantly, he realized: the storm had cut power to the mansion.

  Feeling frantically around in the complete blackness, patting himself, he found first his flashlight, then his knife. It was just possible that, in the dark, he could make his way to the three, grab a gun, and then…

  Red emergency lighting glowed into view. Then—fitfully at first, and with increasing strength—the main lights came back on.

  Had the power been restored so soon? But no—the lights were still a little dim and uncertain. Lux’s backup generator must have kicked in.

  On the far end of the lab, he heard a groan as someone tried to rise to his feet.

  Logan peered around the doorframe at the Van de Graaff generator. It was dead, powerless. Activating it again meant using the toggle switch. To attempt to approach it again, exposing himself to a field of fire, would be madness.

  He wheeled around, looking down the short hallway. His eye paused at the oversized ventilation grate.

  Maybe, just maybe…

  He rushed over to the grate and knelt, flipping out the blade of his knife and running it along the closest edge, trying with all his strength to pry it away from the wall. The edge of the grate moved an inch, then another.

  He heard voices around the corner now, growing closer. Logan moved the knife to another edge of the grate, working it loose with the blade….

  With a faint snick, the blade snapped off near its base.

  Jesus, what else! Pocketing the broken knife and grasping at the partially loosened grating, he yanked at it with a grunt. With a pop, pop, pop of screws tearing out of the wall it came away, and he flung it across the hallway. From around the corner came the sound of running feet.