The Forgotten Room (16 page)

“Let me get this straight,” Olafson said. “You let Ms. Flood into the secret room.”

Logan nodded. It was the following morning, and they were standing in the parlor of Willard Strachey’s set of third-floor rooms. The curtains were drawn wide, yet the space remained dim: a large tropical depression had formed over Bermuda, and already clouds were starting to veil the coast as far north as New Hampshire.

“And this was
after
telling her about the room
—and
about Will Strachey—when you’d been explicitly told of the need for discretion.” The director’s face looked pinched, his lips pursed into an expression of extreme disapproval.

“I needed information, and she was the obvious candidate.
Look. She’s the great-granddaughter of Dark Gables’s architect. She worked with Strachey on the plans for the redesign. She refused to help unless I gave her physical access to the room.”

“My God, man! Didn’t it occur to you that she was just using you, leveraging this request of yours as a way of getting into the room?”

Logan hesitated a moment. This had, in fact, not occurred to him. But he dismissed it as being alarmist.

Olafson shook his head. “I don’t know, Jeremy. You’ve changed since you were last here. Maybe it’s all the press you’ve received. I thought I could trust your circumspection in this matter. But you’ve far exceeded your brief, and I’m afraid—”

“It’s a good thing I did,” Logan interrupted. “Because I’ve made some discoveries. Troubling discoveries.”

At this, Olafson fell silent. After a moment, he motioned for Logan to continue.

“We’ve discovered the doorway to the room—if you can call it a doorway. I’d have never found it if it weren’t for Pam Flood.” Briefly, Logan sketched out how the room was accessed by a manually operated elevator concealed in the storeroom overhead. “And on the heels of that discovery, I learned something else—that a person or persons unknown have begun making use of the room…and recently.”

A shocked look came over Olafson’s face. Unconsciously, his fingers went to the knot of his tie, smoothing it down against the crisp white of his shirt. “How recently?”

“Hard to say exactly. A few months, perhaps. Half a year. But, Gregory
—they knew we were coming
. That’s why the room was spotless. That’s why all the books and files had been removed. I think they’ve resurrected the work that was shut down three quarters of a century before. Resurrected it—and
refined
it.”

“Could it have been Will Strachey himself?” Olafson asked. “I mean, he was the one who ordered the work stopped.”

“I wondered that myself. In hindsight, it hardly seems likely,
since he was in charge of the reconstruction project and could have found a subtler way to keep the room secret. But the fact is I have proof it wasn’t Strachey.”

“Proof,” the director repeated.

Logan nodded. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out one of the devices they had discovered in the hidden tray the night before, and held it out. Olafson reached for it tentatively, as if it might bite. He turned it over in his hands once or twice, then handed it back with a look of mute inquiry.

Logan placed it on a side table. Then he turned toward Strachey’s cathedral-style antique radio, picked it up, opened its back, and showed it to the director. “Remember my asking whether Lux ever did any radio research?” he asked. “Look inside.”

Olafson peered in. For a moment, a confused expression came over his face. Then his eyes widened as he made the connection. He looked over at the device sitting on the side table.

“That’s right,” Logan said. “They’re the same—except that the one in the radio has been enhanced, updated, with an integrated circuit instead of vacuum tubes and a twenty-first-century battery instead of electric power. If you reach into the radio and turn the device over, you’ll see for yourself. They’ve been installed on the underside—no doubt to be better concealed.”

Olafson took a step back. “What does it mean?”

“I’ll tell you,” Logan said. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”

When the director did not reply, he picked the unit off the side table and went on. “Last night, while investigating the secret room, I found a holding tray for four devices just like this. Two were missing.” He patted the radio. “One of those is in here.”

“But
why
?”

“I don’t know what the devices do, exactly. But I think that whoever was accessing the secret room put one into the radio and, knowing Strachey’s penchant for antiques, gave it to him as a present. Also, knowing of Strachey’s mechanical incompetence, they felt confident he’d never mess with the radio’s innards, try to get it
to work. Because the ironic fact is that it
did
work—at least, in the way our unknown friends meant it to.”

“You don’t mean…” and Olafson went silent.

“Yes.” Logan waggled the device in his hand back and forth—gently. “I think one of these was used to prevent Strachey from continuing his work in the West Wing.”

“And you think that thing is responsible for what happened to him?”

Logan nodded. “As I said, I don’t know how it works—not yet. But, yes, I think it caused Willard Strachey’s psychotic break.” He slipped the device back into his jacket.

“That means we have a murderer here at Lux,” Olafson said.

“Clearly, someone who believes the technology in that room is valuable enough to kill for.” Logan closed the back of the radio and replaced it on its shelf. “My guess is that whoever is responsible was close to completing their research. They knew Strachey’s demolition crews were only days away from uncovering the room. But they still needed to finish their work. Nothing else makes sense. If they weren’t so close, why get rid of Strachey like that? No, they figured they needed just the amount of time it would take for Lux to recover from Strachey’s death and assign somebody else to the renovation. By then, their research would be done and they’d be gone. They hadn’t counted on…” And here he went silent.

“They hadn’t counted on you,” Olafson finished the sentence for him.

“When they learned I was here, this person—or people—must have guessed why. I believe it was then that the room was emptied of its contents—at least, those that were movable.” Logan ran a hand through his hair. “Once or twice, those first nights examining the room, I felt certain there was someone nearby, listening, watching. No doubt it was the killer, trying to determine whether or not I’d discovered the space.”

“If you’re right,” Olafson said after a moment, “then shouldn’t we stake out the room? Have it guarded, twenty-four hours a day?”

“I considered that. It wouldn’t work. As I said, the person, or people, know we’ve discovered the room. They would find a way,
some
way, to continue using its technology.”

Olafson did not reply to this.

“What I can’t understand is how this person learned about the old research. Obviously it’s not one of the original scientists—they must all be deceased by now. My guess is that it’s somebody at Lux who’s been snooping around the files in archive two and came across the redacted Project Sin files accidentally.”

“That’s not possible,” Olafson said in an odd voice. “First of all, I doubt there are any relevant redacted files in archive two. Even if there were, nobody could get access to them. Fellows are only allowed to file, or remove, folders directly related to their own work—we’re very careful about that.”

Over the course of the conversation, a parade of emotions had marched across the director’s face: first anger, then disbelief, then shock, and now something that not even Logan could read. Something in it alarmed him. “What is it, Gregory?” he asked.

Slowly and carefully, like an old man, Olafson gripped the arms of a nearby chair, then lowered himself into it. “There’s something I need to tell you, Jeremy,” he said in a solemn voice. “If I do, I’ll be breaking a solemn vow that’s held for many decades. But I think you need to know. You need to know, but I don’t know how to begin.”

Logan took a seat across from the director. “Take your time,” he said.

Then he waited, in the dim light of the parlor, for Olafson to speak.

After a few minutes, Olafson shifted in his chair, cleared his throat.

“Several days ago,” he began, “you asked me if I’d known the forgotten room existed, or what it might have been used for. I told you I didn’t know.” Olafson hesitated again. “That’s not true. At least, not precisely true.”

All of a sudden, the director—whose eyes had been roaming the room as he spoke—met Logan’s. “There’s something you have to understand. When you showed up here in answer to my summons, I was in shock. I was completely overwhelmed by what had happened to Will Strachey—by what he’d done. There were things you said, things you asked me, that I didn’t fully absorb at the time. If I
had
absorbed them, I might have forbidden you to examine that room. But I’ve had time now to reflect on what you’ve said. And I’ve had time to…remember.”

Watching Olafson, Logan was suddenly reminded of their conversation in the director’s office, before they’d gone down to dinner, when he’d told Olafson about Project Sin and the missing files, and of his suspicion that the forgotten room had been the location of some mysterious research. At the time, a look had come across the director’s face: the look of a man who’d just come to a realization.

“Go on,” Logan said.

“The fact is, you’re quite right, Jeremy—more right than you know. Secret work was going on here in the late twenties and early thirties. I can’t tell you the nature of that work, because I don’t know what it was. But I know knowledge of the work was confined to just the small group of scientists undertaking it—and the director of Lux at that time. I do know the work was being conducted in an undisclosed location here, on the Lux campus. I think it’s safe to assume that location was the secret room that you—and, I fear, poor Will—discovered.”

The director rubbed absently at his chin. “I don’t know any details. What I do know is that those few who knew about the work held out great hope for it; that it would prove to be a true boon to mankind. But as the nineteen thirties progressed, the mood of hope turned to one of concern. You know, of course, that Lux’s charter prevents it from undertaking any research that could possibly be used to harm humanity.”

Logan nodded. “So I assume this secret research began to lead in that direction.”

“Yes. Or at least, the
promise
of that direction was there…should people have decided to act upon it.”

“So the research was abandoned, permanently.”

“Abandoned, yes. But not permanently. A decision was made to mothball the work—to seal it away, in essence—until such time when it could be reexamined, and a determination made as to whether technology had sufficiently advanced so the work could be accomplished
in such a way that it couldn’t be retasked to harm humanity
.”

“A scientific time capsule,” Logan said.

“In effect. To be reopened—or, at least, reconsidered—one hundred years later.”

“And, no doubt, all paperwork, journals, and notes on the project were moved from Lux’s central files to the forgotten room itself. That would account for the gaps in the record.”

“Most likely. And then the room itself was sealed.”

“No.” Logan rose to his feet and began pacing. “I don’t think it needed to be sealed. The only entrance was hidden inside a column in a disused storage room on the floor above. The secret room was, to all intents and purposes,
already
sealed off.”

“In any case,” Olafson went on, “the few scientists who had worked on the project took solemn oaths of secrecy and left Lux within months of the project going black. That much I know.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“Not much. In my office there’s a safe—a special safe. It contains a sealed dossier. In 2035, that dossier is to be opened, and a panel convened to determine whether the old research can be safely reactivated. When I took this position eighteen years ago, I was told—among various other things—about the existence of this dossier. It is the duty of each outgoing director of Lux, in fact, to brief the incoming director on it, and to explain the importance both of the dossier itself and of the year 2035.”

“Passed down, in secret, from one to the next. The same way an outgoing president briefs the new one on intelligence matters, hands over the nuclear football.”

Olafson grimaced. “I can’t say I like the allusion, although that’s it in a nutshell. But you see, Jeremy, I am
four directors removed
from the events that took place here in the midthirties. I was told about the secret work, about the dossier in the private safe, during the course of a five-minute conversation years ago. By the time Will killed himself, I’d forgotten all about it—or, I suppose more accurately, it never occurred to me that it might have any bearing on recent events.”

“No,” Logan said. “No, of course not.”

“That’s why I had no problem sanctioning your exploration of that room—and also why I didn’t link its existence with Will’s death. But given what you’ve discovered, given that device you just showed me…I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

“I agree.” Logan stopped pacing. “So let’s go.”

The director frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry?”

“Let’s open the safe.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“You don’t understand.” Now it was Olafson’s turn to stand, alarm on his face. “By telling you this, I’ve already broken my oath as director of Lux.”

“But the answers we need are in there, and—”

“Jeremy. I’ve told you this, I’ve voiced what no director has since 1935, to let you know that you’re right. Secret work, dangerous work, was being done here, no doubt within the secret room. You’re close to an answer now—I know it. Now I’ve provided you with the confirmation you need to keep you on the right course.”

Logan, almost dazed by this sudden refusal coming on the heels of such an unexpected revelation, struggled with conflicting emotions. “Greg. It’s your moral and ethical duty to show me the contents of that dossier.”

Olafson shook his head almost sadly. “No. I’ve already broken my oath as director. I’m sorry, but I can’t compound that by breaking my promise to the Lux charter.”

“Then more people are going to die,” Logan said quietly.