The Forgotten Room

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.