I sweep the beam of light ahead of us, targeting the end of the hall.
“So, the Faraday cage?” Charlene whispers.
“Yeah, let’s see if it really does block out all electromagnetic signals.”
“You going to be okay with that?”
I’d made a decision earlier regarding the chamber. “I don’t need to go inside. You can take care of that.”
“Of course.”
I see that she’s eyeing the line of doors to our right. “So, do you know where it is?”
“Third floor. North wing, east side, end of the hall.”
She stares at me. “How do you know that?”
With my flashlight I motion for her to follow me, and we head toward the stairwell. “In the LRC brochure, there was a photo of a researcher monitoring someone who appears to be resting on a reclining chair. Right?”
“Sure. That was the sender.”
“Exactly. The person who’s supposed to be transmitting loving thoughts — good energy, that sort of thing.”
“Be nice, dear. That’s going to be your job tomorrow. I don’t want any negative vibes coming from you.” She thinks for a moment. “But I don’t understand the significance of that picture. The guy in the photo isn’t in the chamber. So how can you tell where it is?”
We reach the stairs. Start to climb to the third floor. “Beyond him is a window. You can see trees outside the glass, but neither the tree trunks nor the canopy are visible. The forest is on this building’s east side. Also, based on the relatively uniform height of the forest canopy behind us, I’m guessing that the floor the chamber is on—”
“Ah, I get it. The third story.”
“Yes. And from the journal articles, we know that the distance between the sender and receiver is 120 feet. I’m anticipating that the easiest way to measure the distance would be if the chamber were on the same floor as the sender’s room. Also, as we approached the building, I saw windows uniformly placed on the west side of the wing, but the room with the Faraday cage wouldn’t have any. So, based on all those factors, including the length of the hall, the chamber will be located on the third floor, north wing, east side, at the far end of the hallway.”
At the top of the stairs Charlene pauses. “There were blueprints in the material Fionna sent you, weren’t there, Sherlock?”
I clear my throat slightly. “Come on. It’s down here to the left.”
Glenn arrived at the building, picked the lock of the first floor’s exit door, and stepped inside.
Now to find the computer with the files.
Knife in one hand, flashlight in the other, he started down the hallway.
As Cyrus and Riah swung into a gas station on the way to Bridgeport, Riah couldn’t help but wonder about this meeting with the twins. As the lead researcher on the team, she should have been notified that they were back in town.
After all, she was the one looking at ways of recording and electrically stimulating neural activity in the brain’s language recognition center — in the Wernicke’s area of the temporal lobe. Before a person speaks, neural signals command the body to produce those vocal sounds. She was the one searching for ways to decipher the signals and correlate them to specific linguistic patterns.
So. Questions.
Why hadn’t she been told?
Why was Cyrus meeting with them after hours at the R&D complex?
And what was that phone conversation of his about: “We have a man in the area… He’s good, he’ll take care of everything… By tomorrow afternoon it won’t be a problem”?
She had the sense that something dealing with the research had gone unexpectedly wrong.
Or maybe something has gone unexpectedly right.
Cyrus guided the Jag back onto the highway, and she took note of her boss’s demeanor. Over the last four months she’d grown good at reading him, and though he always looked focused, intense, now she thought he looked a bit ill at ease. Nervous? Possibly. But something else too.
Afraid?
Hard to say.
She would watch him closely, note his reaction when they met up with the twins at the R&D facility, and see what that might tell her about what was going on.
The Faraday Cage
The door to the room containing the Faraday cage, or anechoic chamber, is not locked, and the hinge gives a faint squeak as we enter.
The soundproof chamber sits in the middle of the room and looks like a giant walk-in freezer, but of course it wasn’t designed to insulate food or regulate temperature. Rather, the metal walls were constructed to stop all electromagnetic signals from entering. There’s no way of communicating with a person once he or she is sealed inside.
After all, if you were able to send radio signals into the chamber, faking a test like this would be easy. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book for televangelists or psychic healers who claimed to hear voices from “on high” or “the great beyond.”
Simply have the “evangelist” wear a tiny earpiece radio receiver. A cohort reviews people’s application forms and transmits to the guy the names and ailments of people in the audience. Then he “miraculously” calls folks out by name and announces that God has told him their disease or disability, and while everyone in attendance is in awe of his abilities, he “heals” the person.
True, those with enough faith might actually be helped simply because of the placebo effect, but most people wouldn’t be healed at all. And then of course, the blame gets shifted back onto them: “God wanted to heal you, but you didn’t have enough faith. I’m sorry. You just need to believe more.”
Then comes the offering time for “gifts to the ministry.”
A very slick racket.
Charlene opens the chamber door, and my thoughts cycle back to where I am now, here inside the research building.
I peer into the chamber. Someone has made an effort to try and make it look homey. Crammed inside are a reclining chair, a small end table with a stack of spirituality books, and a countertop with instruments to monitor the participant’s heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response. A floor lamp sits nearby. But the feeble attempt at interior design doesn’t do much to soften the impersonal atmosphere of the chamber’s stark, copper interior.
During the test, only air will be fed into the chamber.
That’s it.
A video camera hangs surreptitiously in the corner of the chamber.
Hmm… That carries digital signals to the room with the sender. Is that how they do it? Somehow use the video cable?
I notice a release mechanism on the inside of the door and realize that even if the door were latched shut, even if I were trapped inside, I would easily be able to escape — even without having to get out of cuffs or a straitjacket first.
Still, the idea of being in a closed space like this brings to mind my wife and sons drowning in our minivan, and I immediately feel my breathing tighten, my heart tense. I turn from the chamber and set up the equipment Xavier gave me at the rest stop.
I don’t let Charlene see me trying to calm my breathing.
She closes herself inside the chamber, and we test the RF jammer to make sure that if Dr. Tanbyrn’s team does try to send any signal other than the video feed into or out of the chamber, it’ll be blocked.
Nothing gets through.
I take some time to check different frequencies and settings to make sure that Charlene will truly be isolated from all means of communication tomorrow during the test. There’s no Wi-Fi in the building, perhaps for some sort of security reasons, and none of our mobile devices get through the walls of the chamber.