Tales From the Black Chamber, page 5
Eventually, watching them cross the American Legion Bridge into Maryland, Anne said, “Okay, am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”
“We have a nice safe house in Maryland where you’ll be able to look more at the book,” said Agent Hunter.
“Oh my God, that’s the last thing I want to do right now. I can’t even think straight, and you want me to do paleography?! In freaking Latin?!” Her voice began to crack, so she shut up quickly.
“Ma’am, that may be the one way we’re going to get onto these guys at this point.”
John put his hand on hers, and she instinctively yanked hers away. “Anne, look, this is the best way to keep you safe, and maybe we can get back to our mystery.”
“Mystery?! Nancy Drew never got shot at with fucking machine guns. One minute, we’re looking at a rare book, the next minute it’s the fucking Bourne Identity. Only you’re no Matt fucking Damon.” She saw Hunter crack a sardonic half smile. “No offense, John. I mean, well, sure, take offense. I don’t know anymore.” She shrank into a corner, arms crossed, glowering fiercely at the Beltway traffic out the front window.
Neither of the men seemed inclined to essay conversation after that, so Anne sat in furious stillness as they got off the Beltway at Connecticut Avenue and drove into a suburb just off Rock Creek Park. They drove through a neighborhood until they got to the last street before a ravine, on the other side of which rose the Mormon Temple, an Emerald City in luminous white, surmounted by orange spires on the top of one of which stood the Angel Moroni, his trumpet at the ready for the end of the world.
At the L-shaped intersection of two streets sat a house behind a wall and a long, gated driveway. Agent Hunter took a garage-door opener out of the glove compartment, flipped it open like an old cell phone and entered a code on a keypad. The gate slid open quickly and silently, and the SUV rolled past.
Anne saw the outline of a two-story house in the headlights. Hunter opened the garage door and parked the SUV next to a Camry. After he’d closed the door behind them, he unlocked the doors. Anne made no move to get out.
“Anne, look,” pleaded John. “Give Agent Hunter the manuscript box. He’ll sit on it here, and we’ll take the other car out to a mall and buy you some clothes and toiletries. On me. Heck, I’ll buy you dinner. Or give me your sizes, and I’ll go. You can shower and take a nap and I’ll bring something back. Or you can take the car. It’s got a GPS navigation thingy. You’re not a prisoner.”
Anne exhaled and leveled her gaze at him. “Look, you. None of those sound appealing at all. I want to be back in my apartment in New York watching TV with no one trying to kill me. Or on my parents’ couch in Albuquerque. The last place I want to be is this dump with you two. But. I am hungry, and I’m not taking a shower until I have clean clothes to change into. So, let’s go, you and I. We’ll shop. We’ll eat. What we won’t do is chat. In fact, I don’t think I’d like you to speak unless spoken to. Are we clear?”
“Pellucid,” he said solemnly. She had to fight hard not to show a little amusement at the baroque vocabulary. From Nancy Drew to The Bourne Identity—what fresh hell was this, Wodehouse?
She turned to Agent Hunter, who was again smiling his ironic little smile, enjoying Ashton’s dressing-down. She picked up the heavy manuscript box and lifted it over the seat, setting it down on the long guns. “Agent Hunter, here’s the book.” Her lips curled into a vicious little smile of her own. “So that you aren’t bored in our absence, by the time we get back, you will have all these pages in numerical order according to the file name printed on each page’s bottom corner, and you will carefully document all the missing pages on a notepad in legible script.”
Hunter scowled and opened his mouth when John patted him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, thanks, Agent Hunter,” and slid out of the SUV.
5
They’d spent a good hour or more walking around White Flint, an expensive mall on Rockville Pike a few miles from the safe house. John did a good impression of a deaf-mute servant. He stayed a pace behind her, and dutifully tendered the Foundation’s Amex card at each cash register. Anne still felt a bit vindictive, so she made sure all her purchases were expensive, including a pair of earrings with a tangle of sterling stems ending in little diamond buds, an original design from the Khoury Bros. store near the foot of the escalator to Borders, her last stop. She picked up what few reference volumes they had on Latin, Renaissance magic, and cryptography. Actually, the last were plentiful, which confused Anne a little until she remembered that the National Security Agency was somewhere around Washington.
Done at last, she turned to John and said, “Okay, I’m ready to be wined and dined. Take me somewhere nice.”
“You like French?”
“I do.”
“After you.”
La Miche, a country-French restaurant in Bethesda, was not far. When they arrived Anne said, “La Miche? Comme ça?” and put her hand on her rear end.
“Um, I thought it meant ‘loaf of bread,’” John said, a tad abashed.
“It does. A round loaf. Which is why it’s slang for ‘buttock.’ Where’d you learn French?”
“My German’s better,” John truckled.
Not willing to let him off the hook, she said, “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t taste like ass.”
Quite the contrary, she found out. She happily ordered for both of them. Baked brie and white sturgeon caviar to start, goat cheese salade maison, and filet mignon au poivre et bourbon for her and cuisse de canard Grand-mère for him. As she placed the order she said, “We’d also like the soufflé. But no hurry.”
Seeing John wince a little, thinking about what must already be the mother of all expense reports, she waited until the waiter was gone, took a sip of wine, and said, “I hope they don’t rush the soufflé. Agent Hunter’s going to need a lot of time.”
John actually spat out a little of the water he’d been drinking. He looked at her, and saw her laughing eyes and let himself laugh. Soon she was laughing too. Finally, she drained the glass of wine, signaled for him to refill it, and said, “Okay, John. Look, I’ll level with you. This is all a little too much. But you seemed—seem—like a really decent guy. Can you explain any of this to me?”
“I’ll try. What do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters, who do you work for? Don’t say the Coolidge Foundation. I got that. Even if that’s technically true, there’s no way some little library foundation has its employees packing heat. ‘My name is Decimal, Dewey Decimal. Double-O 813.54.’”
John laughed out loud. Anne continued, “Also, you were able to pull strings with the FBI to get us on a plane and have Agent Hunter show up at the airport with an arsenal and drive us to a safe house. That strikes me as very unusual for a ‘historian.’” She sat back in her chair.
“Okay, well, let’s see. God’s honest truth.” He held up a hand as if swearing an oath. “I do work for the Coolidge Foundation, and they do make me carry a gun for reasons I can’t go into but aren’t unrelated to the kind of unpleasant scene we had today. I do not work for the CIA, DIA, DEA, FBI, ATF, Secret Service, NSA, NIS, or, um, Scotland Yard. I called Agent Hunter and asked him to help, because he’d spoken to both of us about Mildred’s death.”
“So why does he call you John, John?”
“Okay, ok, you got me. I’ve worked with him before. A few years ago, we had some instances of interstate fraud involving some books we thought we were acquiring. He was the Special Agent in Charge. So we’re friendly. He’s really not that bad, even though he’s a little by-the-book.”
“He seemed to enjoy my ripping into you a lot.”
“He has a sense of humor. It’s just, well, it’s just hidden behind the whole G-Man persona.”
“Well, we’re definitely staying out late to make him get the book back in order.”
“Oh, definitely. How’s the caviar?”
“Extraordinary. Pass the brie, please.”
When they returned to the house, which proved to be a conventional, spacious, pleasantly furnished suburban residence, they found Agent Hunter in the basement, surrounded by stacks of thin white foam board and aluminum tubes. He was thumbtacking a page to a piece of foam board that already had four or five attached neatly, though spaced seemingly at random.
“Steve,” said John.
“John. Ms. Wilkinson.”
“Can I ask what this art project is?” said John, slightly sarcastically.
“No,” replied Hunter.
Anne stared at all the oddities. “You’re organizing all the pages to be displayed on the foam board. I’m guessing ten to a side, twenty to a board. So all the pages have a pre-ordained place, and you can view them ten at a time.”
Hunter looked up, his face still deadpan, but when he spoke, appreciation was audible. “That’s it exactly.”
“That’s very clever,” said Anne. “But what are all these aluminum pieces?”
“Frame,” Hunter explained. “When it’s put together, you’ll be able to flip the boards left and right like pages in a book.”
“Oh,” said John, with sudden understanding. “Like a poster rack in a store.”
Hunter just nodded.
“This is great. Brilliant even, Agent Hunter. Thank you,” gushed Anne.
“Don’t let his monosyllabic grunts and lack of social graces fool you, Anne,” said John. “Agent Hunter here is a former Navy SEAL. His IQ is probably 140 or so.”
Hunter scowled at John. “I don’t think we should get too familiar here, John.”
“Fine, fine.” John accepted the reproof with obvious annoyance. “You just cost yourself an assistant.” He turned and headed back up the stairs.
“I’ll stay,” offered Anne.
“Thanks anyway, Ms. Wilkinson. I do better work alone. Go get some rest. You’ve had a terrible day.”
“Are you sure, Agent Hunter? I’m feeling much better with some food in me.”
He shook his head. “Really, I’ll be fine. You’ll have this upstairs by breakfast. It’ll have casters, so you can move it from room to room.”
“You’re sure?”
“Good night, Ms. Wilkinson.”
Anne went upstairs to the master bedroom, showered, and collapsed into a black, dreamless sleep. When she came downstairs the next morning around ten-thirty in a pair of jeans and a red cashmere sweater, he’d been as good as his word. The display looked like something a museum curator might have in his workroom.
John was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and working through the Post and Times. He looked up from a sports page. “Hey, Caps won last night. Ovechkin had two.”
Anne furrowed her brow. “That would be … baseball?”
“Close, hockey.”
“Sorry, I don’t really do sports. Nothing against them, but I’ve been a bit career-minded, so that was a whole hunk of life I decided I could ignore. I’ll still watch a football game if the Broncos are playing. But hockey? I think the last game I paid attention to was an Albuquerque Scorpions game when I was home for Christmas in college one year.”
“Nekulturnaya.”
“Ha!” she laughed. “You speak Russian?”
“A little. I take it you do.”
“Yeah, I took a couple years in college. I was a bit of a Dostoyevsky freak.”
“I’m a little worried that our current predicament owes a little to Besy.”
“Demons?” she asked, referring to the great novella.
“Hi, John. What are we talking about?” came a loud voice from behind Anne. She jumped. Agent Hunter stood behind her, scowling at John, with the M16 slung over his shoulder.
John looked down at his newspaper. “Russian literature.”
“Really? Enlighten me,” said Hunter. “War and Peace didn’t fit in my pocket in Afghanistan.”
Anne stepped in. “John was saying that our problems reminded him of the Dostoyevsky novel Besy, which used to be called The Possessed and is now usually called Demons or The Devils or something like it. It’s about a bunch of political fanatics—terrorists, really.”
“Ah.” Hunter still looked a little askance at John.
“Right,” said John with an ‘I told you so, idiot’ glare at Agent Hunter. “What I was going to say is that the people we’re dealing with are a little too trigger-happy for my liking. I mean, they killed Mildred out of the blue, then tried to shoot Anne and me into Swiss cheese. No threats, no warnings, straight to murder. That’s fanaticism, I think.”
“It’s scary,” said Anne.
“Yep,” said Hunter, crossing to the counter. “Coffee?”
“Thank you,” said Anne.
Hunter poured her a cup, then returned to the living room, where he leaned the M16 in a corner. Anne took her mug and followed him into the room.
“Thank you very much for this wonderful display, Agent Hunter. This should make our job a lot easier. I noticed you put key numbers on the sides of the boards to make it easier to find what we’re looking for.”
“What are you looking for?” the FBI man asked.
“Well, first, some oddity in the text. It’s conceivable that a page here or there could have been replaced with something else—a message, a map, a code, something. Secondly, maybe something extraneous like a note in the margins or the like.”
“It is fairly marked up, I noticed last night. Do you know all those languages? I recognized German, Greek, Latin, and some others.”
“I do, actually. I was a little bit of a nerd.”
“You hide it well.”
“Thanks, Agent Hunter. What about you?” Anne hoped a little chatting might make him a little friendlier, but her question seemed to turn his face to stone again.
“Me? I’m going to go clean the shotgun. I have no idea when it was last fired.”
Skimming the papers, Anne ate a bowl of cereal; then she and John got settled in the living room with the chart. They decided on a methodology of scanning all the sheets on one side of a board to see if anything struck them, then taking all ten sheets down, dividing them in half, going over them closely page by page, and finally replacing them.
After a couple hours, John rubbed his eyes and said, “You know, it’d be nice to have something to compare this to, to kind of be able to say, “None of this is relevant.”
“You mean another copy of the Brevarium dæmonologicum?” Anne replied. “I’m sure there’s probably a rare-book dealer here in town that has one. They’re not that rare. I know Georgetown’s library has one.”
John stood up. “Problem solved. The Foundation has excellent relations with Georgetown. I’ll be right back.”
“They’ll just give it to you?”
“Sure. We loan them stuff, they loan us stuff all the time. It’s a little bit odd for me to call them up and say I’m on my way over to get something, but …” He waved and walked out to the garage. Anne listened to the door go up and down and then turned back to the photos.
The control copy did help, though John made himself more work by deciding to go back to the beginning and write down all the underlined phrases in case they somehow formed a code. Sometime shortly after midnight, Anne rubbed her eyes for the umpteenth time and yawned. She took a sip of the café mocha for which she’d sent Agent Hunter out to the Chevy Chase Lake Starbucks.
Anne’s cell phone rang, showing a 212 number, but not one she recognized.
A man’s deep voice said, “Is this Anne Wilkinson?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Ms. Wilkinson, I’m Detective Marvin Lincoln of the NYPD arson squad, and I’m calling to find out if you are all right.”
Her heart began to race. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’m on business in Washington, D.C. Why are you calling me?”
“Well, we’re not one hundred percent sure, but it looks like someone blew up your office.”
“What?!”
“According to passers-by, there was a loud boom about a half hour ago, and your office window blew out in a fireball, showering glass all over the street. FDNY responded almost immediately, and the fire was out within a relatively short period. There was some blast, fire, and water damage to the offices adjacent to yours, but the place was empty and no one seems to have been hurt. There was no evidence of anyone being injured on the scene, and we’re calling all your coworkers at home to ensure they’re all right.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“So I’m glad to be talking to you, Ms. Wilkinson.”
“And I to you, Detective.”
“So, can you help me out? Why would someone blow up your office?”
“I don’t know, Detective. To scare me? In which case, they’ve succeeded. Otherwise, perhaps to destroy something? My computer? My files? The rare books in my wall safe?”
“The wall safe was intact, though damaged, and your partner Mr. Hathaway’s coming down to check out any water damage to the contents. It didn’t look like anyone tried to open it, though.”
“That’s very strange, Detective. I’d be happy to give you the contents of my computer. H&E has an off-site backup system, so I imagine you’ll have all the information as of a couple days ago at the earliest.”
“Thank you, Ms. Wilkinson. Did you have any personal objects or other valuables there that might have been stolen and the bomb placed to cover up the theft?”
“No, I’m afraid not. My office isn’t very personal.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have done this?”
“The only one who occurs to me is a very strange man who was in my office last week.” She described the man to the detective and referred him to the D.C. detectives investigating Mrs. Garrett’s murder. Detective Lincoln asked her a variety of other questions, to which she had very basic answers.
“Okay. Thank you for your time, Ms. Wilkinson. I’m glad you’re all right, and I’ll be in touch with more questions soon, I’m sure.”
“Thank you, Detective.”
On the couch, John looked stricken. “What happened?”
