The Secret Page

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The Secret Page Page 15

by Al Turner


  Tripp turned the knob of the heavy metal door, which opened with surprising ease. A light automatically came on. Examining the door more closely revealed a watertight, sealed entryway. “Odd,” he said, “But we are at least partially underground. This room appears to seal out water.”

  Carson and Daniel weren’t as impressed by the door and started to push their way past him. As they all peered inside, the previously dark room came alive before them.

  THE HIDDEN ROOM

  At first they were hesitant to enter the room, which was slightly bigger but similarly proportioned to a train’s boxcar. The medley of colors and sights, however, beckoned them onward. They passed various screen images that glowed from behind the smooth, dark glass walls that ran the length of the room on both sides. The floor, a glossy midnight blue stained concrete with a clear sealant, reflected the flickering images coming from the walls. At the end was a large screen on the wall hovering above a metal desktop that stretched the width of the narrow room.

  Carson, Tripp, and Daniel took their time making their way to the end, studying the images embedded behind the glass. As they traveled along, they noticed the wall to their right was dedicated to family history; multiple, changing images of people and places appeared and dissolved. The opposite wall displayed current news channels, as well as text information that constantly updated or security camera feeds that monitored unfamiliar locations.

  Carson paused on the history wall, noticing the changing images of her family throughout the years on one screen. Images of her mom’s lovely face accounted for the lion’s share of the pictures, but some showed her and Tripp at various points in their lives. She smiled at one: as a girl, she was boldly jumping off a rock into the water, while Tripp, beside her, hesitated to follow. The images cycled every few seconds. Then something stopped her in her tracks.

  “Look at this,” she said and hoped the others would catch a glimpse before it disappeared. Tripp and Daniel, who had been watching a webcam on the opposite wall from her, turned to see the picture. Two young men in their late teens were standing on a dock in front of a fishing trawler, each with an arm around the other. One had sandy-blond hair and vibrant blue eyes, while the other’s hair and eyes were darker. The words, in red, at the bottom of the photo read “RIP, my brother.”

  “Dang, his eyes were as pretty as yours, Carson,” Daniel observed of the bright-eyed man.

  “Dad and Uncle Conner were both cute,” Carson said, then thought it a strange thing to say. “That must be where I get my striking good looks from.”

  “From which one?” Daniel asked with a laugh as the image faded away.

  Tripp shot a hateful look his way. “Please don’t get her started on family conspiracy theories.”

  Another picture, a young Kate Page, appeared within the twenty-inch screen on the wall. She was standing beside someone, but the image had been cropped to a head and shoulders shot highlighting the planes of her beautiful face.

  “Never mind, I got my looks from that hot mama,” Carson said, impressed by how beautiful her mother had always been.

  “She was definitely hot,” Daniel said. “I’ve heard some refer to her as a milf,” he added with a laugh, but he looked embarrassed when both Tripp and Carson shot warning glares.

  “Try and remember who that woman is,” Tripp said curtly and walked on.

  Daniel muttered an apology as they reached the end of the room and examined the silver metal desk. They learned it was actually a framed dark glass top that stretched about six feet across and four feet deep. With a black border taking up the edges of the desk, the usable working area was equivalent to a sixty-inch monitor screen.

  Carson reached out and touched the surface, then jumped back in surprise when it came alive with a shimmering blue image of water. She ran her hand across the surface and watched simulated ripple effects follow her touch.

  “Way cool,” said Daniel. “Your dad has a touchscreen table.”

  “An odd setup for a small-town preacher,” Carson said, taking in the room around her. The ceiling above, made of tarnished old copper panels, was the only unreflective surface. She turned her attention back to the desk.

  “I have to admit, Dad hardly seems the type to have such equipment,” Tripp said. “We really should avoid disturbing anything.”

  Carson chose to ignore the warning. She had found a way to change the image to that of a glowing koi pond and amused herself by moving her finger across the simulated water’s surface and watching the digital fish react. When she became bored with that, she began to touch random areas, which triggered a prompt for credentials.

  “Oh crap,” she said and tried to cancel the prompt. It persisted on the screen and she couldn’t continue past it.

  Daniel, seeing the request for authorization, fetched some hacking tools. He retrieved an ultrathin laptop and fired it up. He searched through his applications, which he had either obtained from hacking sites or crafted himself. After bringing up the one he wanted, he tapped away at a command prompt.

  Carson soon became disinterested. She also needed to use the bathroom, but the closest one may have been back at Tripp’s office. She turned to head out the door they had entered.

  “Where are you going?” Daniel asked.

  “To the bathroom. Is that okay with you?”

  “I wouldn’t. Odds are Pops is in our office by now.”

  Carson wasn’t in the mood to argue. When a girl had to go, she had to go. She turned and gritted her teeth. “Oh, for the love of—”

  “How may I assist?” A woman’s voice echoed through the room.

  Carson froze, as if not moving would prevent further detection, while Daniel jumped. The men started exchanging signals while Carson searched for the source of the voice. Daniel became confused by what Tripp was trying to direct him to do. Finally, the silence was too much for Carson.

  “Who are you?” Carson demanded.

  “I am Love, your personal assistant,” the voice said.

  “It’s an AI assistant!” Daniel said, relieved it wasn’t someone watching them. “Maybe she’s like the holographic assistant in that game we play, Tripp.”

  “Would you be quiet? Geek,” Carson said irritably.

  “Okay, I will be silent,” said the artificial voice. “Let me know if I may be of further assistance.”

  “Not you,” said Carson. “I need to find a bathroom.”

  There was no response. She held out her hands in frustration. Tripp walked over and whispered instructions into her ear.

  “Love, please tell me where the closest bathroom is.”

  “I will show you, Carson Page,” said Love.

  “Oh shit!” she exclaimed, “it knows who I am. This thing acts like my phone.”

  A green glow appeared around a section of the glass wall to her left. With the sound of hydraulics in motion, the glowing section of wall sank, slid sideways, and disappeared behind the rest of the wall. It exposed an opening to a hallway.

  As Carson walked through the newly opened door, small LED lights on the edges of the hall lit up and stopped at another door to her right. Opening the door, she found a spacious bathroom. It too lit up as she entered.

  The large bathroom was complete with a glassed-in shower, copper basin sink, and soft music emanating from an unseen source. The floor and walls of the entire room were gray sandstone. Carson made her way to the toilet. Afterward, she washed up at the sink, which was powered by motion sensors. Out of curiosity, she opened the medicine cabinet to see what was inside. It was much deeper than she anticipated and stocked with an assortment of toiletries for both genders.

  Carson walked back into the hallway and turned to her right to explore further. As she moved forward, the rest of the short hall was lit for her, and at the end she had the option of going left or right. To her right was a roomy walk-in closet. It lit up as she entered.

  The closet walls were hidden behind dozens of hanging clothes. There were suits, shirts, dresses,
jackets, and other items. Below the wardrobe were containers filled with various items. Carson opened one near her and found hairpieces and fake beards and mustaches. Quickly, she went through one plastic tub after another and found items ranging from socks to jewelry to makeup. It was the wooden chest in the corner, however, that really caught her eye.

  Inside, Carson found old pictures, high school awards, colored contact lenses, and even fake IDs. Several appeared to show her dad in various disguises, using aliases. A blonde woman’s passport with the name “Diane Conner” grabbed her attention. She studied it and concluded it was her mother.

  The shock of the discovery caused her to sit for a while before deciding she had seen enough. She took a picture of the passport with her phone and returned it to where it had been. Then she spotted a book.

  Carson examined the little diary and realized she had seen it before—and recently. She picked the lock that bound it shut and read through some of its pages. “So, Mother, that’s where you hid it,” she said, referring the object that had started her and her mom’s latest quarrel.

  There was no time to go through the unread parts, and she debated whether to return it to its place or not. Finally, her curiosity won the internal struggle. Carson tucked the diary into her pants and pulled her shirt over it. She wondered what she might find next as she headed for the room across the hall.

  The thick metal door had been left open. As she entered, the room lit up, revealing a much larger one than the one she had just left. Her eyes grew as big as saucers at what she saw. Guns, knives and a shooting range? What the hell? The newly acquired phone slipped from her hand and bounced on the floor. She retrieved it and found it had suffered a cracked screen from the fall. Cursing to herself, she snapped photos and headed back to the others.

  ***

  Tripp looked at Daniel with uncertainty. “Are you sure about this?” He watched him remove a panel from underneath the touchscreen table.

  “I told you, it’s the only way to get a physical connection to this system,” Daniel said, glancing up.

  “I thought you said you’d hack in using Wi-Fi?”

  “That was until I saw the encryption being used,” Daniel replied. He looked for the connection that had been hidden behind the panel of the machine. “Whoever put this in here didn’t want to make hacking it easy.”

  “Imagine that,” Carson said as she entered the room. Quietly, she motioned for Tripp to follow her. He gave her a curious look as they walked to the room she had just come from.

  “I was going to just show you a picture, but I thought you should see this for yourself,” Carson said as they entered. “Not to mention, photos look like crap on a cracked screen.”

  Tripp surveyed a workout center, which was bigger than a three-car garage. As they walked across the stained concrete floor, he noticed the various workout machines, the punching bag that hung from a steel beam, and a small pistol range. On the wall was a paper target with several holes closely grouped in the center.

  But it was the far corner of the room Carson wanted him to see. On one wall hung just about every melee weapon he could imagine. On the adjacent wall, recessed within a dimly lit shelf, was an extensive collection of pistols and rifles.

  “I know Dad isn’t a libtard, but did ya ever think he was the NRA’s poster boy?” Carson asked.

  “Although I don’t subscribe to labels, he did give me some pointers when I was qualifying for my concealed weapons license,” Tripp said.

  “Okay, but did ya imagine this shit?”

  “No,” Tripp said and started to leave.

  Carson hurried around him to block his exit. She held up the image of their mom’s fake passport. “And how about this?”

  Tripp studied the picture on the cracked screen, then put his hands on his sister’s shoulders and looked straight down at her. “Carson, after what we just learned, this hardly comes as a shock.”

  Carson gave him an astonished look. “So this isn’t beyond weird, huh, genius? They kinda forgot to tell us, didn’t they? And what about the fake last name Mom used?”

  “I saw it. She used Uncle Conner’s first name as a faux surname. It’s a common practice to choose an alias with some familiarity to it,” Tripp said and moved her aside as he left the room.

  “That’s all you have to say?” Carson said.

  “They’re not secret agents, Carson.” Tripp’s voice echoed down the hall.

  She trailed after him. “You don’t know that.”

  They entered the technology room and noticed Daniel was busy at the touchscreen table. From behind, they noticed he had accessed some type of files. Absorbed in his work, he failed to notice them at first.

  “Any luck?” Carson asked.

  “I was able to access one folder, but there’s not much in it,” Daniel said without looking away.

  “You should make a copy so we can leave,” Tripp said.

  “Already done.” Daniel dragged a file to the edge of the table with his finger. With another push, the virtual representation vanished and then reappeared above on the wall monitor. “I just wanted to see what this one was. It was recently viewed by someone else.”

  It turned out to be a satellite image of the southern coast of the country. A red pushpin icon marked one location. Glancing around for a way to manipulate the map, Tripp noticed a glowing pad appear on the touch desk. Using finger gestures for pinching and expanding, he was able to zoom outward.

  It displayed the entire Emerald Coast, Mississippi, and parts of Louisiana. He had zoomed out a bit further than he intended. But because of this, they spotted more areas marked with the same red pushpin icons.

  “More locations of interest,” Tripp said and pointed. “I wonder if there’s some sort of legend that tells us what these locations mean.”

  One marked area wasn’t too far from their current location, while another two pointed to places in New Orleans. Scrolling to the west, they found two more spots flagged in Texas and one in Oklahoma. The last pin was out at sea, south of Louisiana. It was the oddest of the bunch. Not only did it pinpoint a location in the middle of the ocean, but it also wasn’t red like the others. It was black.

  “Whatever they mean, we need to investigate,” Carson said. “The ones in Texas are places I’ve been near. That one’s not far from Austin, or perhaps San Antonio. The other is north of Dallas where there are several possible towns. Those two are in New Orleans.” She studied the remaining ones. “I have no idea what the black one stuck in the Gulf is, but this red one looks like a place near Perdido Key. The last is in Southeast Oklahoma near Broken Bow.”

  Nodding, Tripp confirmed what his sister said. He was impressed with her familiarity with various regions, although she did get around. While most of his knowledge came from books and the Internet, she loved to travel. “Daniel, can you find any clues to what significance these points on the map have?”

  “Working on it,” said Daniel as he fidgeted with the table display. He tried to find a menu listing but was thwarted by the roadblock of being prompted for authentication at every turn. “I can only get so far. If I fail to authenticate again, the whole thing might lock us out.”

  The room’s lighting suddenly went red. Startled, everyone wondered aloud what they had done to set off an alarm.

  “Warning, motion detected in the outer hall,” came the synthetic female voice.

  A video feed of the outer hall replaced the map on the big screen. The infrared camera, which they had missed seeing themselves, showed three figures making their way toward the floor panel Carson had sealed earlier.

  “We need to leave, Carson,” said Tripp, tugging at her arm. “Pops is on his way. Daniel, put this machine back together.”

  Daniel immediately got to work but Carson stood there, as if not wanting to leave.

  “They may not know we’re here,” she said. “This place is well hidden.”

  “I must agree with Carson,” said Daniel as he replaced the panel. “This place
is great. Imagine the information we could access if given the time.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Tripp said tersely. “We’re likely being watched as we speak.” They followed his extended finger to the upper corner, where they noticed the eye in the sky.

  “Please—we may still have time to retrieve some more data,” Daniel said.

  “Cached memory flush completed per protocol,” came Love’s voice.

  “Never mind.”

  “We have to believe Pops knows about this place,” Tripp insisted.

  As he said it, they witnessed on the video feed Pops opening the floor panel and stepping down into it. They had seconds before he reached the main entryway.

  “Shit, you’re right,” said Carson. “Hey, Love, is there another way out of here?”

  “In addition to the main entrance, there is an emergency exit,” replied Love’s voice.

  “Love, show me the emergency exit.”

  A glass-covered panel on one of the walls behind Carson lit up in a blue glow. She stood by it and waited for something to happen, until the realization hit her. “Love, open the damn emergency exit.”

  The blue panel slid away to reveal a tunnel lit by white LED lights that formed a path on the ground.

  Carson paused before she entered the newly exposed tunnel. “Love, did you also report an intrusion when we arrived?”

  “All entries to this compound are logged.”

  “Just checking,” she muttered and hurried away.

  They followed the tunnel, which wound around to their left and then curved off to their right. It straightened out for another fifteen yards or so and ended at a steel ladder. Looking up, they could see a round hatch with a lever at the top.

  Tripp took the lead and climbed the ladder, then opened the hatch. His head popped up in a small garden. Within seconds, he identified the place. “We’re in the area between the canal and our street,” he announced and climbed out. The other two followed.

  “Who would’ve guessed this exit was here?” Carson said as she surfaced in the pocket park. Set on an irregular piece of land at the water’s edge, it wasn’t much—just a concrete bench, grassy walking area, an old iron grill on a concrete slab, and a single palm tree. It was dimly lit by a nearby streetlamp.

 

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