The director hesitated for just a second. “Very well.”
“Am I going to need a brief? A reason to be here, poking around, asking questions? After all, there’s my, shall we say, past history with Lux to consider.”
A pained look crossed Olafson’s face. “I’ve thought about that. Many of the people you knew ten years ago are still here. And, of course, you’ve become rather well known since then. But if you’re to operate with a free hand, I don’t see how there can be any coyness or dissembling. You’re here, at the request of the board, to look into the circumstances surrounding Dr. Strachey’s death. It’s as simple as that — and I wouldn’t be any more specific.”
“Very well. Anything else I should know before I start?”
“Yes.” The director paused a moment. “It’s only fair to warn you that not everyone is going to be happy to see you. I’m not just referring to the ‘past history’ you mentioned. A lot of new blood has joined Lux since you were here, but at heart it is still a very conservative place. There are people who are going to question your motives; people who won’t trust you. You might as well know that the board was deadlocked, three to three, on bringing you in. I myself cast the tiebreaking vote.”
Logan smiled a little wearily. “I’m used to that. Unfortunately, it seems to come with the territory.”
“You’re still part of the Yale faculty, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well, that can only help.” Olafson stood up. “Come on — let’s get you processed.”
5
At half past four that afternoon, Logan stood in his private office on the third floor of the vast mansion, looking thoughtfully out the window. It was of the same heavy, leaded, metal-lined variety that Strachey had employed; Logan knew he would never look at such a window in quite the same way again. It was closed, but nevertheless he could hear the faint roar of breakers as the Atlantic crashed and worried against the boulders below.
He raised one hand and lightly traced his fingers along the window sash. Lux had its roots in a private club, founded in the early 1800s by six Harvard professors to debate issues of art and philosophy. Over the years it expanded in both ambition and scope, its mission broadening, until finally, in 1892, it was organized into Lux, with a formal charter and an impressive endowment. This made it the country’s oldest policy institute — “think tank” to the unwashed — antedating the Brookings Institution by more than two decades. It enjoyed unprecedented success in its early years, quickly outgrowing its Cambridge quarters and relocating first to Boston and then — in the early 1920s — making its final move here to Newport, where it purchased the mansion known as Dark Gables from the heirs of an eccentric millionaire. Over the years, Lux had continued to thrive in its areas of expertise: economics; politics; applied mathematics; physics; and more recently, computer science. The only subject expressly forbidden by its charter was any form of military application — which set it apart from other think tanks, many of which enthusiastically pursued such lucrative research.
Logan stepped away from the window and glanced around the room. Like the rest of the mansion, it was ornate, opulent, and expansive. In addition to the office, there was a small sitting room, a bedroom, and a bath. Logan’s eye stopped when it reached his desk. He had already laid out some of his work materials: a laptop; a camcorder; a digital voice recorder; an EM detector; an infrared thermometer; and a dozen or so books, many of them bound in leather, most hundreds of years old.
A low knock on his door interrupted this survey. Logan walked over and opened the door to see a young man in a muted business suit hovering outside. “Excuse me,” the man said, handing Logan a sealed folder marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. “Dr. Olafson asked me to deliver this to you personally.”
“Thanks,” Logan replied with a nod. The young man went off down the richly carpeted corridor and Logan closed the door with one shoulder, unsealing the folder as he did so. Inside was a single, unlabeled DVD.
Walking over to the desk and taking a seat, he powered up the laptop, waited for it to boot up, and then inserted the DVD. Moments later, a media player window opened on the screen and a video began to play. Logan immediately recognized it as the security feed he’d watched in Olafson’s office: the grainy, black-and-white image of a man in an elegantly appointed library, pacing and pulling at his hair.
Logan clicked the pause button. He did not want to watch that again. He stared thoughtfully at the now-frozen image of Strachey. Olafson’s words came back to him: I knew Will Strachey for thirty years. He was the most stable, the most gentle, the most rational of men. This was a man with everything to live for. That man in the video is not the man I knew.
He closed the view window, then fired up a utility to extract the audio portion of the DVD. Next, he opened the resulting file in a forensic audio-editing program and played it in its entirety. It was just four minutes and twenty seconds long. After listening to it once, Logan deleted the last thirty seconds: the screech of the descending window sash, the sickening crack, and the two thuds that followed were almost as horrifying to listen to as they’d been to witness.
Now Logan listened to the audio file again. The first forty-five seconds consisted only of heavy footsteps and stertorous breathing, and he deleted that as well. He was left with an audio file approximately three minutes long, of poor quality, full of hum and hiss and digital artifacts.
In the editor’s main window, the audio was displayed as a waveform: a fat, ragged line that ran from left to right, studded throughout with needlelike spikes. Logan opened a smaller window and instructed the program to run a spectral analysis of the audio file. He peered at the resulting display, examining and adjusting the amplitude and frequency values. Next, he ran a glitch-detection macro over the audio, adjusting its threshold slider to an aggressive setting. He corrected the file for DC offset, increased the gain, then ran it through a parametric equalizer chained to a high-pass filter.
Now the file was louder and clearer, and the majority of the hum was gone. Strachey’s voice was more audible, but it was still difficult to interpret — partly because of the poor audio, and partly because Strachey was alternately gasping and mumbling. Nevertheless, Logan made the best transcript he could, playing the difficult passages again and again and listening very closely. As much as possible, he tried to put himself in Strachey’s shoes, imagining what the man might be feeling, then interpolating the results.
“No…No. I can’t, I can’t.”
This was followed by a passage of rapid breathing, almost hyperventilation.
“Help me, please. It follows me everywhere. Everywhere. I can’t, I can’t escape!”
Logan heard the doorknob being rattled, books flung from their shelves.
“It comes from the [undecipherable]. I know it does.”
Various crashing noises; the sound of a table being overturned. For a brief moment, the voice became clearer:
“The voices — getting too close. They taste like poison. Have to get away.”
Then the voice grew more distant as Strachey staggered away from the recording camera.
“It is with me. They are with me. In the dark. No, God, no…”
That was it. Suddenly, the tremulous agitation in the voice eased. The breathing slowed, became almost calm. Logan stopped the playback; he knew what was going to happen next.
Saving the transcript to a text file, he closed the laptop and stood up, returning to the window and the view of the gray Atlantic. He had, for the purposes of deciphering the audio, tried to put himself in Strachey’s shoes. Now he wished he hadn’t. There was nothing there but inexplicable, sudden madness — madness and death.