Free The Forgotten Room by Lincoln Child Page A

Beyond lay rooms that, though dusty and long abandoned, had not yet been touched. What was it about this spot that had suddenly convinced Strachey the wing was unsound?
    Lying on the floor in front of the tarp wall was a small gold mine of equipment: nail guns, sledgehammers, compressors, a portable generator. It was almost as if the workers had dropped their tools and run.
    He hesitated a moment. Then, turning, he shone his light over the tarp that blocked his way to the right. Once again, he took a penknife to it, then peered through the tear that resulted. To his surprise, there was no opening or corridor beyond—but instead a bare wall.
    This was odd. Logan could understand why Strachey would bar entrance to an area that might be unsafe. But why cover a wall?
    Carefully, he pulled the tarp away from the nails that fixed it in place and pinned it back, exposing the wall beyond. It was clearly old, dating back to the original construction of the West Wing. Workmen had removed some of the wallpaper and plaster, exposing the old laths.
    In the middle of the wall, at approximately chest level, a ragged circle of plaster, roughly the size of a fist—or the head of a sledgehammer—had been set into the lath, like a plug in a dike. Logan examined it with his flashlight, then scratched at it with his fingernail. It was fresh plaster, only recently set. It could not have been applied more than a few days previously.
    Using the tip of his knife, Logan worked away at the edges of the plaster patch, easing it away from the surrounding matrix of lath until it fell out, landing at his feet. Where it had been was now a hole in the wall, black against black.
    Bending forward, Logan shone his flashlight at the hole and peered into the cavity beyond. Almost immediately, he went rigid.
    “What the
hell
?” he muttered under his breath.
    He snatched the flashlight away, almost as if he’d been burned. Then he stepped back: one step, another.
    For a long time he stood, staring at the ragged circle of black. And then—laying his flashlight on the ground so that it illuminated the wall—he pulled a sledgehammer from the pile of equipment. Hefting it, he tapped it gently against the wall a few times. Then, taking a firmer grip on the handle, he struck the sledgehammer against the lath surrounding the hole.
    A spiderweb of cracks appeared, and a rain of plaster chips fell to the ground.
    Again and again, Logan hammered at the wall, but cautiously, calculatingly, knocking away the old construction, creating a passage just large enough to duck through.
    After about ten minutes of work, he’d extended the space from the preexisting hole down to the level of the floor: a black maw about four feet high and two feet wide. He put the sledgehammer down and wiped his hands on his sleeves. He paused a moment in the darkness, listening. He’d been as quiet as he could, but a sledgehammer was not a delicate instrument. Nevertheless, there was no sound of voices, no calls or cries—this far from the occupied areas of Lux, his work had gone unnoticed.
    And now he picked up his flashlight, moved toward the opening he’d made, bent low, and then disappeared into the hole.

12
    Beyond lay a room. As Logan played his flashlight around it, he saw it had been a laboratory of some kind. There was a single worktable, surrounded by straight-backed chairs, on which sat a few old-fashioned pieces of equipment. A much larger device—waist-high and even more mysterious in appearance—sat in the middle of the floor.
    The room was not large—perhaps twenty feet square—and was constructed of the same tasteful cast as the rest of Lux. An elegant fireplace was set into one wall. A few pictures in antique frames hung here and there, but they were not like the pictures seen elsewhere in the mansion: one frame held a Rorschach inkblot; another a painting by Goya. An old-fashioned percolator sat on a corner table. A vintage phonograph stood on a stand in one corner,