She opened the custodian’s closet and removed the six-foot aluminum stepladder and carried it back down the hallway and into the General Astrophysics lab which abutted deVere’s locked lab. Swinging wide the double doors to the file room, she opened the ladder just inside, and slung her shoulder bag atop a file cabinet. She climbed the ladder and pushed the ceiling tile up from its frame. She slid it over and reached into her shoulder bag. Her hand found the headlamp and cordless saw. The air duct was just where the building schematic had shown it. She knew that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, but her experience had shown that sometimes straight lines ran over the tops of walls meant to keep out intruders.
She made one more reach into the bag for the safety goggles, duct tape, and cordless screwdriver. No need to have the night’s mission detour to the emergency room at the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. Despite their stellar reputation, sporting an eye patch the next morning would doubtless draw the wrong sort of attention.
Goggles and headlamp in place, she made short work of the sheet metal on the far side of the ductwork. She tore two lengths of duct tape that she folded over the metal’s rough edges. Grasping the support brackets, she pulled herself up until her knees were level with the opening, and then threaded herself into the ventilation system.
“I hope this holds,” she muttered. Like an inchworm, she crawled the few feet until she reached the air diffusing register in the high ceiling of deVere’s lab. She studied the register in the intense halogen beam of her headlamp. Not even screwed in place! She lifted the register and placed it gently ahead of her in the duct.
She poked her head down into the lab and played the lamp’s beam across the floor. Finding it clear, she dropped lithely down from the duct. A momentary panic hit her. How will I get back up? Her head swung about as she scanned the room for a chair. But how would she get it back in place afterwards? Then she laughed aloud. Linear thinking again! Better to keep the mind open to other possibilities. The security system worked to keep people out, not in. She would just walk out the door.
She turned on the overhead light and turned off her lamp. She propped open the door with a notebook. Back in the General Astrophysics lab, she remounted the stepladder, and duct taped the sheet metal panel back in place on the far side of the duct. She admired her handiwork from the file room floor.
Good as new, she decided. She folded the ladder and returned the lab to its original condition. The lab door automatically locked behind her as she carried the stepladder into deVere’s lab. She set it up beneath the opening in the ventilation duct and mounted it to coax the register back into position. Looking around the now-lit room from her perch, the top of the back wall caught her eye. Something was not right. A thin dark shadow ran the length of the wall.
The register dropped into place with an audible “huff.” Natasha started down to the floor, never taking her eyes from the shadow. The shadow disappeared as she approached ground level. She walked over to the wall and rapped her knuckles on it. A hollow thunk. She rapped in another spot, and heard another hollow thunk.
“Are you kidding me? A hidden room? In an MIT lab?” She laughed. “The door has to be here somewhere. OPEN SESAME.” The lab remained unmoved by her forceful delivery. The hollow wall was bare, save for two file cabinets and a poster announcing the arrival of the tall ships to Boston in 2025. She walked to the file cabinets and pulled open the top drawer of the first. It was empty, as were all the other drawers. Natasha took a step back, and began to twirl a lock of her hair—a thinking habit she had had since childhood. She looked at the wall, and back at the cabinets.
On impulse she grabbed one of the filing cabinets and walked it away from the wall. Behind it was a ragged hole in the sheet rock, three feet wide by four feet high. She tugged away the second one. She switched her headlamp back on, ducked her head and leaned in, allowing the lamp to play over the floor. Satisfied, she stepped into what she was coming to think of as deVere’s Treasure Cave.
When deVere built the wall, no doubt with Ginter’s help, he had placed it well. The wall separated a six by twelve foot space from the rest of the lab. It was lit from above like the rest of the lab, though it was poorly ventilated. It had a stale smell from a lack of air circulation. They probably spent little time in here. The space was mostly empty, except for some sort of machine.
At first glance it looked like a microwave oven balanced atop two tall computer towers that extended over six and a half feet from the floor. The towers were about four feet apart and extended almost the whole width of the cave. Extending from the top of the “oven” were three heavily wired, flexible arms. The arms stretched toward the ceiling in the center of the space, and then focused their dish-like heads at a white taped X on the floor just beyond the towers. From the microwave looking box at the top, several power and cable cords were strung together and ran down the near tower and then across the floor to the wall. Natasha assumed that they ran back out to the lab.
Doesn’t look like much. Doesn’t look like much of anything I’ve ever seen before. And they went to a lot of trouble to hide it, she thought. She considered “firing it up” from the red power switch on the front of the right tower, but common sense prevailed. It would be enough for now to keep pace, and get the jump on them when they were further along. She wondered just how far along they were.
She checked her watch. It was a good night’s work. She stepped back into the main part of the lab and slid the file cabinet back into position. She folded the ladder and carried it out into the hall. Returning to the lab, she looked around, ascertaining that all was as she had found it. She removed her notebook/doorstop from under the door, brushed it off, and put it back on the counter. After turning off the light she stepped from the darkness into the brightly lit hallway.
It was late, and she was tired, so she considered taking the elevator down the twenty floors to the lobby. But her training dictated that stairs were safer. You never knew who might be waiting when an elevator door opened. Stairs always meant options.
Chapter 7
“Paul!”
“Hello, Amanda.”
Amanda Hutch placed her briefcase on the table in the otherwise-deserted history faculty lounge. “What a surprise. I knew you were here, of course,” she flustered. “I mean, MIT’s a small place, really, you’re bound to run into the other professors sooner or later, especially the physics faculty in the history lounge. Makes sense.”
“So, how are you, Amanda?”
“I’m good,” she said. “You’re looking good, Paul. Married with a beautiful little girl, I hear.”
“Grace is an angel.”
Amanda nodded. She looked down at her purse and reached in. “I know. I heard about Beth,” she said, fumbling a cigarette out of a pack.
“Oh don’t start,” she said, lighting up.
“Smoke away,” Paul said. “Your lungs aren’t my concern any more.”
Amanda smiled. “Nice to know you still care.”
Rather than answer Paul smiled. The ironic thing, he told himself as he stood there looking at her for the first time in 28 years was that he was surprised at how much he was caring. Oh, he had thought about her all right—every time he and Valerie had fought and he had told himself that this time he would not apologize under any circumstance, for instance. He had been able to roughly follow her career from a distance through the occasional Gorenect-mail from an old classmate with a casual reference. But until he again gazed at her shoulder length brown hair framing that thin pushed face with high eyebrows over bright eyes, he had forgotten how much he still cared.