Prologue (12 page)

She laughed. “It was just over 45 years ago the tide in this country was running the other way and everyone was witch-hunting Communists. Now look.” She laughed again, this time more ruefully. “You gotta’ love the irony.”

Paul took a swig from his mug and waited.

She stared off around the pub, not looking directly at him. Finally, she pursed her lips and turned toward him.

“They said they won’t approve my certification. They’ll even hold up my PhD.”

When Paul started to speak she held up her hand.

“Oh yeah, they can,” she said. “They can do it. They can keep me from getting a job at even a community college.”

“Isn’t, isn’t there any, any appeal?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No.
Nothing.”

Paul sipped his beer. Amanda’s lay untouched in front of her.

“There’s no one you can go to? Nothing you can do?” he asked.

“There is something I can do,” she answered. “Their letter started off with their ‘findings.’ They concluded by saying that they thought I could benefit from some re-education. The bottom line is that if I agree to teach American history over in
Leipzig
, right in the heart of the Reds, they’ll grant me a provisional PhD. I think they need teachers over there and this is just a ruse to get one.”

She was angry, and despite the sarcasm Paul knew she was hurting.

“For how long?” he asked.

“Five years,” she answered immediately, and it was at the moment of hearing those words that Paul realized that no matter what, his life from that day forward would never be the same.

He sipped more beer, and then drained it off and refilled his mug. He studied Amanda’s face.

“I love you, Paul,” she said. “And I always will.”

“I love you too,” he answered, but she was already shaking him off.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to marry you. I want to... I don’t need to teach.
At least not in college.
We can get married, and I can teach elementary school or junior high school, or heck, even high school, maybe. The Committee can’t do shit about that. We can settle in some small town, maybe even back in your
New Hampshire
in some place where they don’t give a fuck about the Committee. If we stay in the Northeast District they can’t touch us here. Not really. Not at the high school level. We can do it.”

The light from the fireplace was dancing off her face. She was beautiful, and on this evening the reflection from the glowing embers gave her face its own glow, one he had never seen before. She was so alive, full of spirit and fight. Her eyes were the color of Cayuga Lake, yet whenever he told her that she would laugh him off and ask if that were before or after it had become polluted.

It had all suddenly become so complicated. He struggled for words.

“If you’re teaching in
Hicksville
, where am I going to teach?” he asked. He knew he was at that point in his life his grandfather told him everyone reaches. Do you do what is most comfortable or do you do what is right?

“You can’t,” he said, wishing even as he spoke that he wasn’t saying it. “Amanda, you love history and research more than anyone. You live it. How long would we be happy teaching high school in some small town? How long before you began resenting your decision, resenting everything we had given up, and then resenting me because of it? You’re not a high school
teacher,
you belong in a major university. We’ve got to prioritize.
Leipzig
is only five years.”

At some point Sal had brought over the pizza, and, seeing their faces, put it down without his usual banter. But, as with the beer, Amanda never touched the food.

Chapter 6

Friday, July 10, 2026

Tonight was probably as good as any. She had heard Ginter and deVere talk about “grabbing some dogs outside the park.” They were attending another baseball game. They had both left the lab by
4:00
, and once they were gone, the support staff had quickly found reasons to leave. Natasha stood alone outside Paul deVere’s lab.

She slipped her right hand inside the v-neck of her shirt and lifted the chain from which her DNA-encoded pass card dangled. Taking the card in her left hand, she swiped it through the lab door’s scan reader while simultaneously placing her right hand on the palm reader.

“Natasha Nikitin, Access Denied,”
came
the computer voice from the door speaker.

Well, it was worth a try, Natasha thought, smiling wryly. Now she would have to do it the hard way. She walked down the hall, passing deVere’s and Ginter’s locked offices. It was unlikely that she would have any better luck with those doors, and she would only increase the possibility of discovery. Two weeks before she had walked into Paul deVere’s office and found him checking the computer’s log of accesses to his office.
A task of boredom?
Or was there something to hide in the office? She had slipped in once when he had gone down the hall to visit the “little scientists’ room,” but her hasty search had found nothing. Tonight she would be more thorough.

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.