Page 27 of Trapped With the Secret Agent

He glanced at her. She was moving slowly from one rack to another along the wall. He turned his attention back to examining the bolts that held the rack in front of him to the wall.

“Peter, come look at this.”

He turned around. Georgia was staring, not at one of the racks, but at a corner half a foot away from one.

“What’s wrong?”

“I think there’s a gap here.” She sounded excited.

He hurried over and looked hard at the line where the two walls met.

“I don’t know.”

“Trace it with your finger,” she suggested. “It feels like a gap to me.”

He did. “You’re right.” He turned to her with a big grin. “There’s a slight draft, but I can only feel it up close.” He took a step back. Visually, there was little to give the door away. He couldn’t even tell how large it was. He grabbed the wine rack attached to the wall closest to the corner and pulled then pushed. Nothing happened. He tired the rack on the adjacent wall, thinking maybe the door swung the other way. Nada.

“It’s locked somehow.”

“Damn it.” Georgia stared at the wall and racks, looking deflated.

“Hey, don’t give up so fast. It can’t be that hard to figure out.” He gave her a grin then he turned his attention back to the wall.

“Ok, if I was building a secret emergency tunnel, I’d want a door that was hard to spot and difficult to open by accident, but easy to open on purpose. Right?”

“I suppose.” Georgia’s eyes followed him as he paced back and forth in front of the wall, craning his head this way and that to look at it from all angles. She didn’t seem happy.

“So, there must be a way to open the door that wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Georgia, a tad more enthusiasm on your part would be ok, you know. I won’t tell anyone.”

“You want me to be enthusiastic? No problem. I’ll be in cheerleader mode just as soon as you figure out how to open that thing.”

But Peter didn’t hear her. He was thinking hard, going over every word the ambassador said about the tunnel early this morning. It had been just a casual remark. A curiosity. Something Mitchell could tell only a select few.

When that came up empty, Peter went over every word the ambassador said after that. Nothing stood out. His thoughts focused on the last encounter with the terrorists. Wait. The phone numbers. Mitchell had given him both the president and the secretary of state’s phone number, but the secretary of state’s hadn’t worked, and he’d been forced to call the Oval Office directly. Could that be it?

Peter stepped back a couple of paces and looked at the wall and the rack bolted to it. The cradles that the wine bottles lay in were numbered. Holy crap. What was that phone number again? Two, zero, four, six.

Peter found and lifted bottle twenty. Nothing. Just an ordinary bottle. No hidden switches or levers. Then he tried number two. He had to stretch, it was high up on the rack and the bottle wouldn’t come loose. He lowered it slowly back into its cradle and tried number zero. It too wouldn’t come out. He moved on to four then six. As soon as he allowed number six to rest, he heard a faint click and the wall swung outward a couple of inches.

Georgia gasped behind him.

“Well, will you look at that,” Peter said with a chuckle as he pulled the door open. “Your uncle has balls of steel. He gave me the combination to unlock this door while the terrorists were pointing their guns at our heads.”

“Excuse me?”

Peter wasn’t sure if it was his off-color remark that caused the look of horror to come over her face or that the ambassador gave it to him in plain hearing of all those bad guys.

“The phone number he gave me for Secretary of State Madison was wrong. It didn’t work. I had to call the president direct. But why give me a bad number? At the time I chalked it up to the stress and pain he was in, but he was really thinking, that sneaky bastard. It wasn’t a phone number at all, it was the combination to unlock this door.”

Peter chuckled again.

“We have to go in there?” Georgia was staring at the ragged opening behind the wall. Peter had to admit it wasn’t what anyone would call inspiring. It looked suspiciously like someone abandoned work on it before it was finished. And it was pitch black inside.

“I think this is a bit of camouflage, you know?” Peter said with a nod to the black maw in front of them. “Anyone finding it would just think it was part of an old wall that was falling down or something.”

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