Will climbed up on a chair, and examined the top surface of the fireplace mantle. Brad wanted to pull back the carpet to check for a door in the floor, but before we could get that far, Caitlin called and said that it was time for Will to come home. Shortly after that, Brad had to leave too.
When Ben went up to his room to do his homework, I was alone in the study. I just wasn’t ready to give up on the idea. I decided to do some research on my own.
First, I got Mom’s magazine and read the article through myself—twice. Then, I searched through the books on the shelves in the study to see if I could find anything else on secret passageways.
Finally I found a book on Victorian architecture. It was old and the pages smelled musty, but it looked promising. I took it upstairs and left it in my room to read later that night.
All through dinner, I kept thinking about hidden tunnels—and how great it would be if our house had one.
Uncle Charlie must have asked me three times to pass the salt before I heard him. Savannah made a crack about me being the absentminded professor. Other than that, I don’t think anyone perceived how far away my thoughts were from the food I was eating.
• •
I was in bed and reading that night by ten o’clock.
The book explained that Victorian era homes were the first houses to be built with the comforts that we have today. Before that, houses may have looked grand, but they were little more than basic shelter.
Before the Civil War, houses were drafty and cold in the winter. They did not have inside plumbing, which meant no bathrooms, and they had no running water in the kitchen.
The Victorians changed all that. They were the first to build houses with central heating, weather-tight windows and doors, indoor running water, and lights—either gas or electric.
This type of housing was expensive, and only the well-to-do upper-middle class could afford it. For the first time in history, the value of a house was based on how comfortable and modern it was.
I learned that secret passageways were frequently built into houses of our home’s age. Speaking tubes and dumb waiters were even more common.
Speaking tubes were basically an early form of the intercom. Pipes ran inside the walls with openings into various rooms. It was typical for speaking tubes to be either connected to more than one room, or to use a separate speaking tube in each room, connected to a central location.
A person could speak into the opening on one end and it would be heard easily by someone at the other end—even one or more floors away. This let servants talk to each other without having to walk through the house.
Dumb waiters were small elevators in which laundry or heavy objects could be placed to be hoisted from one floor to another.
I even learned that different floors of a house are called stories because the landings of the stairways usually had stained glass windows. The pictures that the different windows depicted quite often told a story.
I put down the book for a minute, wondering about the history of my own house. How strange to think that when it was new, the family who owned it certainly would have had servants who lived in the house too. Life must have been very different back then if having central heat and running water were only for those who were wealthy.
Just then, Mom tapped at my door, reminding me it was late. Reluctantly, I turned off the light by my bed, and pulled the covers up over my shoulders.
Chapter 4
That night, I tossed and turned. Try as I might, I just could not sleep! I had been so confident that we would find a secret passage leading from the study. Seriously, every wall in that room had paneling and bookshelves, so many places a secret latch or doorknob could be concealed. It was the perfect room for it.
In movies I’d seen, someone would press on a panel, and a secret door would swing open, or roll back, or the bookcase would turn out to be a door. Why couldn’t there be a hidden passageway in our house?
When I heard the clock strike one, I decided to go down to the study and investigate again. My bedroom was at the opposite end of the house, and the hallway leading to the study would be dark. I grabbed a flashlight and headed down for one more look. The light cast by my flashlight made the room seem foreboding. I hurried to close the door so that I could turn on the lights and dispel the shadows that loomed around me.
I glanced around the room. Where should I start? I looked thoughtfully at the windows. Outside were the woods where I had loved to play since before I was Lillie’s age. These same woods were where railroad tracks lay, long forgotten now by almost everyone. I felt a shiver and turned from the windows to begin my search.
My eyesight isn’t the greatest. At times I have trouble noticing things that others seem to see right away. But sometimes more than just sight needed to look for something …
I remembered watching my dad prepare to hang a mirror on a wall. He would tap lightly along the wall, listening for a difference in sound. He’d explained to me that he was listening for the wood studs behind the wall. He wanted the extra strength of a stud to support the weight of the mirror. Eagerly I began tapping every few inches along the wall. Wait, I thought, what’s this? One section of paneling sounded different than all the rest!
I switched my flashlight back on, and passed the light slowly back and forth over the panel in question. There was a knothole. I couldn’t see into the hole at all, but when I held my hand over it, I could feel a faint breeze coming from it.
After a while, I concluded that if there was a way to open this section of wall, the way was hidden from me.
I went back upstairs to my room and finally fell asleep, dreaming of hidden halls and speaking tubes.
I don’t know what woke me. I suddenly was just awake. The house was still, and I could hear voices coming from downstairs. It sounded like my uncle and another man talking.
Curious, I crept down to the first floor landing and looked down into the living room. There, in front of the fireplace, stood my uncle and the man whose voice I’d heard.
Although they both were looking into the fire, they were in an animated conversation. After a moment, the visitor turned slightly. I stifled a gasp! From where I crouched, looking through the railing, he looked exactly like someone I’d seen frequently on the evening news. He looked just like the new director of the CIA!
Not wanting to be caught like a little kid spying on them, I forced myself to turn around and quietly make my way back to my bed. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, wondering what project my uncle was involved with.
Chapter 5
On Friday of the following week, our teachers had meetings and there was no school for us. We met Will and his sister down by the creek. Brad couldn’t make it. He’d gone to visit his dad over the long weekend.
We started working to repair the dam that we’d built the past summer. The heavy rains had caused a few cave-ins, and now water was flowing through it. Our swimming hole was gone.
Ben and I hunted around to find as many heavy rocks as we could. We all agreed that the basic design of our dam was a good one, but it needed more support behind it.
Will and Caitlin were knee deep in the chilly water, restacking the branches and logs.
As I didn’t want to chance taking my phone close to the water, I put it on a fallen log a little way from the water’s edge. After my brother and I rolled the stones down to the creek, I found myself thinking about the unexplained network signal that had popped on my phone the week before.
Out of curiosity, I returned to the log and picked up my phone. I opened the browser. Once again it was displaying the Wi-Fi login message!
Something was not right. There were acres of trees all around; there were no houses or businesses that would have a Wi-Fi network.
I yelled to the others that I was going to go talk to my uncle about something, and I j
ogged back toward the house.
I found my uncle on his computer in the study. I stood by him, catching my breath.
“Alex, what’s going on? Is someone hurt?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that, there’s just something kind of odd out back in the woods is all.”
After I explained, Charlie looked thoughtful and responded, almost too casually, that maybe I wasn’t picking up a commercial Internet provider, but one used by a private enterprise. He suggested we visit the area together to see if he could see anything that would explain it.
I heard the back door slam, and my brother and friends came in.
I looked at my uncle and said, “Later, Charlie?”
My uncle nodded.
Just before nightfall, Charlie and I went for our walk in the woods. It was cool and crisp, a perfect day for a walk. The fallen leaves rustled as we tramped through them. As we got deeper into the woods, it became quieter and quieter as the sounds of the neighborhood faded away, and we walked on a dense pile of pine needles.
We really didn’t talk much on the way out there. Several rabbits scampered out of our way, and the birds started their evening song in the trees above us.
Soon we neared the fort, and we made our way over to the creek. Neither of us had a signal or login message on our phones. We scouted the area, but I wasn’t sure what we were looking for.
After a fruitless search, Uncle Charlie and I sat on the rails of the old track. Dusk was gathering, and soon night would fall. I was disappointed that nothing had turned up.
My uncle said, “Alex, your phone could have picked up a type of microwave transmission being sent by a network that is not active all the time. It would explain why sometimes you see a strong signal and other times, like now, nothing at all.”
Charlie began to talk about his work. He explained that when he was in Washington, in his office at the Pentagon, his research was very secure. His latest project was highly classified.
When he worked at home, he considered what he did safe because he never worked online over the Internet. The Defense Department made sure that his home address was never given to anyone that did not have top security clearance.
“If there is some sort of intermittent signal showing up out here where there should be none, it could mean that someone has found out where I live, and that person, or organization, is now spying on my work.
“There is a type of computer surveillance known as Van Eck phreaking. It reads electromagnetic energy being emitted from a computer screen—and it is able to extract information from it while the computer is in use.
“Someone using this kind of technology doesn’t have to be close to the computer they are spying on. They could do it from distances as far as two hundred meters away, which is roughly the length of two football fields placed end to end.
“This sort of eavesdropping equipment could have been what was disrupting the steering of Ben’s remote control car the other day.
“If someone is out here snooping around, neither my research nor our family is safe. Anyone who would do this is not someone I would want to be near to those I love.
Charlie sighed, “I moved here with Savannah after my divorce to help your mom and all you guys. It also is good for both of us to have family around when I’m away. I thought this arrangement was best for everyone. I never envisioned being spied upon here.
“However, there are no signs to make me think that anyone was out here. We didn’t find any surveillance equipment, but to be on the safe side, I will request a Faraday cage to shield my computer. In the meantime, I will start encrypting my work.”
I frowned and said, “What’s a Faraday cage?”
“It’s a shield made of a conductive metal such as copper. It keeps electromagnetic energy from passing in or out through it. Oftentimes a metal mesh is used.”
“And why is it called Faraday?”
“It is named after the English scientist who invented it back in the mid 1800s.”
“Mom’s not going to be thrilled to have a metal cage sitting in the study.”
My uncle laughed. “I agree that this wouldn’t fit with her style of decorating. I can have part of the study partitioned off into a separate room. The shielding will be hidden inside the walls, and no one looking at it will be the wiser.”
“What about the Van Eck phreaking? Is that the same as phone phreaking?”
“It’s only a little similar. Both phone phreaking and Van Eck phreaking have to do with hacking electronic devices or systems.
“Nowadays land lines have a switching mechanism that is digital. ‘Switching’ means routing a phone call to connect to the number being dialed. But years ago, there used to be a different method to route the calls. It was done by using a certain radio bandwidth frequency. This is called ‘in-band signaling.’
“To put it simply, phone phreaking was done by hackers who would whistle at a specific radio frequency into the phone receiver. They could trick the telephone company’s switching circuit if they were able imitate the same pitch as the one used by the phone company. Phone companies used to charge high prices for each long-distance call. So the hackers did it mainly to avoid paying for long-distance calls.
“These hackers used different methods to recreate the exact tone. Some trained themselves to whistle at just the right note. Others used canaries because the birds could hit that high-pitched frequency.
“In the early 1970s, one man discovered that the toy whistles given away in a certain brand of kid’s cereal perfectly reproduced this tone if one its two holes was covered. All someone had to do was blow the whistle into a telephone receiver to make free calls.
“Van Eck phreaking is different. It has to do with stealing information that is entered into a computer. It’s a form of spying. Wim van Eck, a Dutch computer researcher, was the first to introduce the idea of computer monitors being at risk to eavesdropping. He wrote an important paper about it in 1985.
“Newer LCD monitors emit fewer radio waves than the old CRT type screens, but they are still vulnerable to eavesdropping by advanced surveillance equipment.
“I know it sounds crazy, but now you should understand why I’m a concerned. If that network notification pops up again, Alex, I want you to come tell me immediately. I’ll talk to the rest of the family concerning double-checking to make sure the security system for the house is turned on when it’s supposed to be.”
“Yeah, we really need to do more about getting another dog too. We all miss having one.”
Charlie smiled, “Maybe we’ll get two dogs.
“Alex, there is probably another perfectly logical explanation for all of this. Because of my line of work, I just thought of this first.” He clapped me on the back and rose to his feet. “We’d better be getting back or supper will be eaten without us.”
It was dark. The frogs were croaking loudly. We made our way back to the house, and dinner was waiting on the table when we arrived.
Chapter 6
The next morning, I made myself a bowl of cereal and mixed up some orange juice from the freezer. I was all alone in the kitchen. Savannah wasn’t up yet, and Ben was at Will’s house. Lillie was watching Mom work on a series of book illustrations in the sunroom. Charlie had flown out of town earlier that morning.
One of our cats, Cosmo, was sleeping in the warmth of the sun on the kitchen table. I didn’t take him down because I was glad for the company.
It was very quiet in the room. I could hear a slight hum from the refrigerator and the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. I felt detached from the rest of the house.
A sunbeam was dancing on the far wall of the kitchen. I found myself looking at it without really thinking about what I was seeing—until the sunlight caught the edge of a rectangular shape in the wall. The outline was b
arely discernible, just the slightest furrow. It was approximately six by eight inches. The more I studied it, the more it looked like a small door—a door with many coats of paint applied to it over the years.
I got out of my chair to examine it more closely. When I ran my fingers over it, it sure felt like something was under there besides just built up layers of paint. I got a knife from the silverware drawer and began working the tip of it into the slight groove that outlined the rectangle.
In a short time, I had dug out the old paint to a depth of around a quarter inch all the way around.
When I stopped to check for any damage from the blade, I must have leaned against one side of the rectangle. The little door popped open! I looked into the recess and saw what had to be a speaking tube! The end of it was flared; it was shaped like the end of a trumpet. The tube itself was about an inch in diameter. The tube was flexible, and I was able to swivel it around so that the mouthpiece of the tube was projecting into the room.
I could hardly believe my eyes. I had no idea how I could have been in and out of this kitchen all of these years and never once saw it.
I heard the back door slam.
“Is that you, Ben?” I called.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“What’s up? I’ll show you what’s up. Come over here and check this out!”
Ben whistled when he saw it. “A speaking tube— just like you’ve been telling me about. Let’s go find the other end!”
The most sensible place to start looking was up in what had originally been the servant’s quarters. To get to the third floor, we went through the kitchen and up a steep narrow staircase that turned at two landings. Many similar houses had converted their third story into apartments, but ours had remained untouched by modernization.
Our family used the area for storage. There were boxes of outgrown clothing, discarded toys, and holiday decorations.
Dust motes floated seemingly suspended in the morning sun that poured in through the windows. We split up, each scouting a different area.
Alexander, Spy Catcher Page 2