Chapter 7
Captured
The elevator was totally silent now that the countdown had stopped. Ryan was sure he had been too late. He imagined dozens of guards racing to the elevator.
Time seemed to stop. A second ticked by.
“Correct password entered,” said the computer. “Security procedures have been aborted. Repeat, security procedures have been aborted.”
“You did it Ryan!” screamed Regan happily. She gave her brother a puzzled look. “But how? What did you enter?”
Ryan smiled. “I remembered another trick to making short words stand for longer phrases—where and how the words are written. Dad and I had lunch at a restaurant about a year ago while you and Mom were at a birthday party and he jotted down some riddles for me to solve while we waited for our food. He wrote the word “Headache” with each letter split in half and told me it was a shortcut to say something longer. The answer was ‘splitting headache’. Do you get it?”
Regan thought about it for a moment and then, smiling, she nodded.
“Another one he did was ‘b e d’. The answer was ‘bedspread’—the word ‘bed’ spread out. But my favorite was ‘HOrobOD’. Robin Hood. The word ‘Rob’ in the word ‘Hood’. ROB in HOOD. Once I remembered this lunch, and knowing Dad, it was easy to solve the password. If you stick the words we are in the middle of the word NOWHERE, you have NO-we-are-WHERE,” he explained. “We are” in the middle of “NOWHERE.”
Regan had counted as he spelled the password. N-O-w-e-a-r-e-W-H-E-R-E. Twelve letters exactly. “Nice going!” she said. “And you figured it out in plenty of time,” she teased. “You had an entire half-second to spare.”
Ryan laughed. “Better late than never.”
As much as he wanted to celebrate this victory for a while longer he knew that they were running out of time and they still hadn’t learned what was happening here and how their parents fit in. He put his finger on the down button. “Ready?”
Regan nodded. “Let’s see where this thing goes,” she said far more bravely than she felt.
Ryan pushed the button and the elevator began a rapid descent. In just a few moments they would be at their destination, probably a basement facility ten or twenty feet down, hopefully a giant step closer to solving the mystery of Proact.
Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Then fort-five. The elevator continued to pick up speed as it dropped them deeper and deeper into the earth. It was now falling at a considerable speed. They looked at each other in alarm. When would it stop? How far down could they possibly be going?
After what seemed like ages the elevator halted suddenly, causing their already nervous stomachs to jump to their throats. They had arrived.
“Ah . . . Ry,” said Regan thinly. “How far down do you think we are?”
“I don’t know,” he answered grimly. “But at least the length of a good-sized skyscraper, maybe two.”
She gulped as the doors opened slowly. They peered out cautiously.
They were in a huge cavern, roughly spherical, about the size of a large baseball stadium. A cavern with an expansive, thirty foot ceiling. The air was damp and cool and powerful electric lights attached to the walls illuminated the area.
They stepped from the elevator onto the rock floor before them, their eyes wide. There was machinery and high-tech equipment everywhere. Scores of heavy, treaded vehicles were parked along one wall, some resembling bulldozers and others military tanks with ten-foot-wide drill-bits where the turrets should have been. An impressive display of machinery. But no people. The cavern was as deserted as a ghost town. It was also perfectly symmetrical and smooth. It was clearly not a natural cave.
Incredible! Excavating a cavern of this size so far beneath the surface must have been an enormous job. Why had it been done?
All thoughts of how the cave was created were swept from their minds instantly by what they saw against the far wall. What in the world?
They walked toward it almost as if in a trance. Dozens of high-powered, high-temperature lasers were unleashing a fury of lava-red beams toward the wall. The beams were evenly spaced so that they created a perfect rectangle of blazing, continuous energy against it. And lasers were only the beginning. Arrays of generators and other equipment of unknown purpose were pointed at the wall, also, contributing what was certain to be massive levels of invisible forces and energies.
Inside the rectangle formed by the blazing lasers the wall shimmered in an ever-changing rainbow of colors. How could this wall—or anything for that matter— withstand this awesome onslaught of heat and energy?
“Amazing,” whispered Regan. “What do you suppose—”
Regan shrieked as two men popped through the shimmering, rectangular kaleidoscope of colors outlined by the beams, from behind it. Like ghosts walking through a wall.
Their reaction to Regan’s scream was immediate. Rolling in opposite directions, they each came up on one knee. They were so expert in this maneuver that the guns they were now pointing at the two young intruders had appeared in their hands as if by magic.
“Freeze!” shouted the man to their right. “Make one move and it’ll be your last!” he finished menacingly.