The Forgotten Room

Logan fell silent. For a moment, the two merely looked at each other. Once again, the basement lights faltered for a moment before brightening again. At last, Benedict turned on her heel, opened the door to the lab, and began making her way back down the corridor. Logan jumped to his feet, turned off the recorder and slipped it into his satchel, and began to follow.

“Listen,” he said as they made their way back through the passages. “I understand. You’re in denial. It’s only human. At the start, you were thinking — understandably — about a wrong done to your grandfather. And a weapon with as much potential power as this one…well, it could be worth a great deal. It meant money.”

“Naturally it meant money,” Benedict said, stopping to face him. “My grandfather was a brilliant man. He practically invented this technology single-handedly — only to be marginalized, to have his greatest creation swept under the rug. He was never recognized for his achievements. He should be recognized. Compensated. My family should have been compensated.” She turned back, continued down the hall. “This is my rightful legacy,” she said over her shoulder. “My inheritance.”

“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 stu

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….