Tales From the Black Chamber, page 4
“Wow, those are beautiful pictures,” John said, as she took the top few pages out. “Was the book really this big?”
“No, the breviary was a fat little book that would fit in a pocket. I just printed these scaled up for eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper on the theory that if we were looking for something small, it’d be easier to spot.”
“Good idea. Nice printing and paper, too.”
“We have a high-resolution printer in the office for printing off last-minute signs and labels for things for auctions. Okay, now look here where the file name is printed in the corner. The three numbers after the P tell you the page number, starting with the inside front cover as 001.”
“And the V and R after the numbers?”
“Verso and recto. Left- and right-hand pages. It’s redundant in most cases, since odd-numbered pages are always left-hand, or verso, and the even ones are recto. But sometimes you have some odd fold-out pages, or printer’s errors that leave blank pages, and the like. It’s just another way to triple-check you’ve got the right book.”
“So, maybe we should start with the cover—” John had begun when a knock at the door startled them. Room service brought in their breakfasts and two pots of coffee. John insisted on the Coolidge Foundation’s picking up the tab. Over Belgian waffles and eggs Benedict, Anne explained she’d been up since six or so, drinking less-good coffee and going through a number of the pages at her breakfast table. She hadn’t come up with a thing. The type and the content were exactly what you’d expect, and the marginalia were pretty conventional stuff. Devotional remarks, underlinings. Occasional explication of a word in Latin or Greek. As she remembered and the photos showed, the cover and binding were also unremarkable.
John asked a few questions but mostly just needed to be brought up to speed on sixteenth-century books. He was obviously not the expert Mrs. Garrett had been, but Anne found his rapt attention to her explanations a more than slightly pleasurable compensation.
His suggestion of dividing up the book into sections by content seemed to make a lot of sense in terms of how to work through it. Anne chose to start at the beginning, and John in the “demonological” section. His Latin was evidently excellent, Anne noted, occasionally looking up to find him engrossed in the text, sometimes chuckling, sometimes nodding his head gravely.
“How’s it going?” she asked him an hour or so into reading.
“Well. This is really neat stuff. I love how they’ve got exorcisms for individual, named demons. I’d think the trick would be finding out their names. Who knows, maybe they’d get cocky and answer to them. Or maybe you just run through them all and hope one works?”
“Got me,” Anne said. “I do know that they believed that when you called a demon by its name, it had to answer.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Anne, warming to one of her favorite topics. “And, in fact, a demon’s name was one of the keys to controlling it. Necromancers and the like spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the names of demons from the Bible and other sources in order to be able to summon them and bend them to their will.”
“Hmm.” John frowned. “If they were real, I think I’d want to keep my distance from them as much as possible.”
“Really?” Anne smiled. “Not even to gain power over your enemies? Or obtain forbidden knowledge? Raise the dead? Contact Mrs. Garrett and ask her who killed her?” Anne stopped as she heard her own words, her joke suddenly leaden and dreadful.
John spoke up quickly, rushing past the discomfiture. “No, no, I mean, I just wouldn’t want those things knowing where I lived.”
“Well, there’s two things there,” Anne said, her feet back on academic ground. “First, if you’re a necromancer, in the context of the day, you’re doing science. You’re doing experiments on the nature of life, death, and so forth. Secondly, you might—and it’s a big might—even consider yourself a Godly person, since the essence of controlling a demon is harnessing some of the Divine to compel the demonic. Some necromancers were priests.”
“Still.” Did John shiver? “Still. I don’t like the idea.”
“Why?” asked Anne. “Are you superstitious?”
John paused, then carefully said, “No.”
He must be religious, thought Anne. Not sure how I feel about that. “Do you want me to look at those instead?” she offered.
“No, no, as I said,” John smiled, “it’s great stuff.”
They sat together in silence until they ordered some sandwiches for lunch, then compared notes over food. Neither of them could come up with anything, though they had covered only a fraction of the book’s pages. They spent the afternoon in companionable silence, occasionally discussing a point of Latin syntax or typesetting. They shared a bottle of wine and some very good sole for dinner, bouncing ideas off of each other, then ordered lots more coffee and dessert for the caffeine and sugar.
Anne heard the knock on the door and John saying, “Come in” to someone who she assumed was Milton, their Ugandan room-service waiter. What happened next was a blur. Thinking back later, she thought she’d seen, out of the corner of her eye, John’s head come up in shock. She heard some soft whistling sounds. John lunged across to the far side of the conference table and pulled it over towards them, just missing Anne’s ankle. Papers flew everywhere. Anne’s first thought was to scream, “What are you doing?!” at John, but when she looked over again, he’d produced a black semiautomatic pistol from somewhere and began firing it over the table. The sheer incongruity of the sight of him standing there in a shooter’s stance, pulling the trigger incredibly rapidly, with everything she thought she knew about him stunned her into silence.
John dropped down below the tabletop to load a fresh magazine and noticed her, frozen. “The pages!” he said in a stage whisper she made out through the ringing in her ears. “Get all the pages!” then popped back up and began firing the gun again, this time more slowly and precisely. As Anne tried to gather all the hundreds of pages and stuff them haphazardly back in the manuscript box, she noticed for the first time the pocking sound coming from the table. She realized there must be bullets hitting the underside. They must have silencers, she thought. She’d been around enough guns in New Mexico to know that she was only hearing John’s pistol.
John changed magazines twice more, firing more slowly and carefully each time. Anne surmised he was trying to hit someone through the doorway and buy her time. He went to change the gun’s magazine again and whispered, “Last one. You ready?”
Anne nodded, though she wasn’t sure there weren’t a few pages on the far side of the table. John pointed at a door on their side of the conference room. “Go left to the ‘employees only’ door.” He stood and fired a shot. “Then turn right and run to the end of the hall. There’s a freight elevator.” He fired again. “If I’m not there in two minutes, take it all the way to the garage and head for the subway.” He fired again. “Ride to the end of a line and call the Foundation’s number and tell them what happened.” He fired again. “Go!” he ordered.
Anne crouched and ran for the door, following his directions exactly. A small part of her brain posed the interesting question, How did he know an escape route? but Anne was in no mood to ponder. She got to the elevator and had started punching the down button repeatedly when she heard footsteps. John was sprinting down the hall behind her, gun in hand. The doors opened. She slipped inside into a front corner next to the control panel, and held the button until she saw John, a blur, leap through the door, and land flat on the floor.
Anne jabbed at the button for what seemed like an eternity as John rolled to the far side of the elevator. She heard the faint whistling sounds again, the dull cracks of bullets ripping through the wall padding and striking the back of the elevator, and sharper reports as others struck the wall out front. Finally the doors closed in what seemed like slow motion and the elevator began to descend.
Anne was still breathing hard, but she was pleased at how calm and rational her voice sounded when she said, “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” said John, his eyes slightly wild and darting hyperactively with adrenaline.
Cold fear flooded her. She hugged herself. “Those men are trying to kill us.”
“Yep.”
“Who are they?!”
“I swear to you, I have no idea.” His eyes looked right into hers, wide, honest, and a little frightened.
“But how did you know to …” she waved her finger around to indicate their flight.
“Contingency planning. We knew there was a chance someone was looking for you.”
“But not a big chance!” Anne felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes, and it made her mad. “And what’s with the gun?!” She pointed at his weapon. “And you said Mrs. Garrett had a gun and could shoot. What the hell kind of foundation are you people running?!”
“Long story. A very strange one, as I think I mentioned.”
The elevator chimed and the display read G.
“Our stop,” said John. “Ready?”
Anne bit her lip, drew a deep breath, and nodded, feeling a bit of steel in her spine. She gripped the manuscript box to her chest. Her eyes narrowed and as the doors began to move, she said, “You’d better have a hell of an explanation ready when we stop running, Mr. Ashton.”
They ran.
After an incredibly nerve-racking trip around the subway system, doubling back, switching cars, crossing platforms to slip between closing doors, they ended up on the Long Island Rail Road out of Grand Central en route to MacArthur Airport. Anne wanted desperately to interrogate John on what in God’s name was going on, but he’d indicated early on that they couldn’t talk in public, and she just didn’t have the heart to chat. John made a few cryptic cell-phone calls, but otherwise just scanned everyone in sight watchfully. They passed almost the entire time in silence. Occasionally Anne caught John staring off into space for a second with a haggard look on his face. God, I’m dead on my feet after just running, she thought. He was in a gunfight.
They walked up to the US Airways counter at MacArthur Airport, and John said to the agent, “We’re John Ashton and Anne Wilkinson. I’m told you’re expecting us.” After he showed a piece of identification, Anne was surprised when the gate agent led them through an unmarked doorway next to the security turnstile. Down a long hall was a small, but comfortable lounge. “Someone will come get you when your plane is ready,” the agent said and left, after they thanked her.
“Where are we?”
“VIP lounge,” he said, collapsing, exhausted into a chair. She stood, arms crossed over the manuscript box.
“We didn’t have to go through security?”
“A lot of law enforcement use this lounge.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No. I work for the Coolidge Foundation. And I can’t really say more than that. I’m sorry. I really am. I really am after today.”
“I appreciate that. But, you know, it’s time for me to go. Obviously, I don’t know you anywhere near as well as I thought I did—and that wasn’t very well to begin with—but there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’m hopping off on some airplane with you to who knows where—”
“Washington.”
“It doesn’t matter. But, look, John, from my perspective, you’ve gone from being an interesting colleague to Some Crazy Guy With a Gun. Look, here, keep the manuscript.” She dropped it on the seat next to his with a little vehemence. “Do whatever you want with it. Just leave me out of it.”
“You’re not safe, Anne.”
“No shit, Sherlock. I’m going to take a couple flights and maybe visit my parents in Albuquerque or some friends in Jackson Hole. Someplace far, far away. If you need me, call my cell phone. Or better yet, don’t.”
“Anne, I don’t mean to alarm you, and I realize you’re being asked to take an awful lot on faith here, but I swear to God I’m just trying to keep you safe at this point. This—” he waved at the box, “this is secondary. I mean, honestly, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to figure it out without you, so I have a selfish reason for keeping you around. I mean, other than that I like you a lot.”
“I liked you too. But, look, you’re not telling me crap, you’re acting like some library foundation is the freaking CIA, and you’ve got a gun. I know you were never a teenage girl, but when we get our first training bra, they give us a booklet that says never cross state lines with a stranger with a gun. So I’m done. Goodbye.”
“Anne, wait. Do you have your cell phone?”
She stopped, halfway to the door. “Yes.”
“Do you have that FBI agent’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Call him.”
Moments later, Anne’s head spun even more when, having explained the situation to Agent Hunter, he said, “Go with Mr. Ashton, Ms. Wilkinson. We know him. He’s trustworthy. Let me make a few calls to the New York field office to find out what the state of the investigation of the shooting is, and I’ll be in touch with you later tonight or tomorrow. But for now, come down here to Washington. You’ll be much safer. And Mr. Ashton is no threat to you. I promise.”
After hanging up, Anne grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and plopped angrily into a chair. She tried to formulate a fierce accusation. “You’re not a librarian.”
“No, I’m not. Mildred was our Librarian. I’m the Historian.”
“For the Coolidge Foundation, about which you can tell me nothing—but that arms its librarians and historians.”
He shrugged helplessly.
“Okay, fine. We won’t talk about you. But we’re awfully alone here. You owe me the benefit of your knowledge about what happened at the hotel,” she said angrily, hoping she wouldn’t burst into tears and ruin the effect.
“Absolutely. But I swear to you, I really don’t know. I’m guessing those are the guys who killed Mildred and, like we thought, they’re trying to kill you because they think you know something about the book. And, if we left any pages behind, they’ll know we have it. Which can’t be good. But, look, all I know is that I thought Milton had brought the coffee and chocolate mousse, so I raise my eyes and there are two guys in the doorway holding H&K MP5SDs.”
“Those are guns, I assume?” she asked, a little abashed at the sarcasm leaking into her words.
“Yes. German-made nine-millimeter submachine guns with integral silencers. Extremely accurate and the weapon of choice of hostage-rescue and commando teams—”
“Not interested. So, they had guns. What did they look like?”
“White guys in suits. That’s all I got.”
“I wonder if one of them was Creepy Guy from my office.”
“Could be,” said John, taking a deep breath. “Okay, so, thank God they didn’t have their guns aimed or we’d both be dead. So I’m guessing that they’re not ex-commandos or the like. Anyway, I turned over the table, trying to dump all the pages towards us, pulled my gun and fired as much as I could to try and keep them out. That seemed to work. They looked surprised as hell. Then they hid behind the doorframes, shooting at me every so often. I think I winged one guy in his arm, but it must have just been a graze, because it didn’t faze him. And this,” he drew his gun, “is a Glock 37 chambered in .45 GAP.” John popped out the magazine and unloaded a bullet onto the side table, then pulled the slide back and placed the bullet’s ejected twin next to it. “If you get hit solidly with one of these, you drop your gun and go down.”
“You’re not going to take that on the plane,” Anne said, incredulous, as he reloaded the two bullets, chambered one, and holstered the weapon.
“I am. We’re not going through security. And if those guys can ambush us with automatic weapons in midtown Manhattan, they could jump us on a plane with a plastic shiv or garrote just as easily.”
“But they don’t know we’re here; and, how…?” Her voice trailed off.
“I hope they don’t know we’re here. But hey, what if they put a transmitter in your wallet or shoe? It’s awfully hard to know. And as to how I can get on a plane with a gun, again, I’m going to have to tell you I can’t tell you how.” He raised his hands in helpless apology.
Anne was amazed as they were led onto the plane, the door closed behind them, and they were seated in the first row of first class. John spent most of the flight standing with his back to the cockpit door, ostensibly reading a magazine, having pled a bad back to the flight crew (who treated them with solicitous gingerliness, as if they were celebrities or spies).
When the plane set down at National Airport, the passengers were told there would be a brief delay before deplaning, and that they were requested to stay in their seats. Anne and John, however, were led right off, through another series of restricted-access corridors until they were met by a tall blond man in a dark suit. Anne did a double take.
“Oh, Agent Hunter! Thank you so much for helping us out.”
“Glad to see you’re well, Ms. Wilkinson.” He turned to Ashton. “John.”
“Agent Hunter. Yes, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Now, please come with me,” the FBI man said flatly.
They walked out an inconspicuous side entrance where a black SUV with tinted windows sat at the curb. Agent Hunter opened the back door and they both climbed in. Anne didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed to see an M16 and a shotgun on the front passenger seat.
Hunter turned on the headlights, as dusk was turning to night, started the engine, then reached into a glove compartment and handed Anne a small, very heavy box. “Could you hand that to Mr. Ashton please, Ms. Wilkinson?”
“Sure.” She did so, noticing in the process that it had the Winchester company’s logo on it and .45 GAP just below that.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome.”
They drove in silence as John began laboriously loading each of the four empty magazines from his pockets with ten rounds of ammunition and topping off the one in his pistol with nine more.
