by Nick Thacker
The Hawk could tell Morrison wanted to shrug, to squirm away and move to the other side of the room. He wasn’t trying to grill the man, either, but this was important.
This was crucial .
The Hawk refused to be played by more than one side. He operated under the expectation that the enemy was always trying to play him, as that was the game.
But it was another thing entirely when a client was trying to play him. If he was getting the run-around from his employer somehow — if she was trying to pit him against the other side so she could extract some sort of benefit from the situation, there would be hell to pay. This was part of the reason he hated American contracts — there was always more of a bureaucratic slant to the work. Someone needed protecting, but it was typically protection from a political enemy, not necessarily a physical one.
He specialized in the physical enemies. The ones who could be hunted.
The ones who could be shot.
Simple, foolproof two-sided warfare. Drug lords running up against a larger empire. A group of small companies fighting an oligarchy. Bankers working to keep their position at the top of a countries’ fiscal food chain safe.
It didn’t matter which side hired him, but he certainly preferred to keep the playing field as simple as possible.
Americans never saw it this way. They thrived in the convoluted grounds of political trench warfare. They wanted confusion, because confusion could be monetized.
He shook his head and smiled, already considering what he might have to do if his boss was playing him against someone else. He raised his eyebrows, focusing again on Morrison.
“We — we don’t have any, sir. As I said, it’s speculation, but there could have been a third party involved, besides the FBI.”
“And if there is?”
Morrison looked blank for a moment, and The Hawk could almost feel the fear inside him. Finally, Morrison recovered. “Then we’ll find them, sir.”
The Hawk nodded and spun around. “Do it fast. We don’t have time.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
REGGIE STARED AT ROGER DERRICK while he spoke. He wasn’t sure if he trusted this guy yet, but everything he was saying seemed to add up, and seemed to make sense.
And I’ve already been proven right about someone once today , he thought, thinking about Daris, the secretive runaway curator-turned-illusionist. He smiled as he recalled the way she’d just simply disappeared into the floor. He hadn’t seen a trick like that since his high school’s stage production of The Phantom of the Opera .
He wondered if she’d had the trapdoor installed just for that moment, or if it had once been used as an access hatch for the basement.
Reggie’s ears perked up as he heard mention of the trapdoor.
“…apparently had it installed shortly after the real APS moved in,” Derrick said.
“The real APS?” Ben asked. “I thought this building was home to the real APS back in Benjamin Franklin’s day?”
“That was the Junto, Julie answered. It wasn’t the APS until later.”
Ben frowned, staring at her.
“What? I read the brief,” she said, shrugging.
Derrick smiled. “She’s correct. But even then, when this building was designated by the American Philosophical Society, it was used for meetings and gatherings of the group, when the office and library needs were still small. The bulk of the Society’s usage moved from here to the Benjamin Franklin Hall, nearby, later on.”
“So what’s this ‘real ’ APS, then?” Reggie asked. He stepped up closer to Derrick, who was still encircled by the group in the center of the basement. As Reggie waited for the answer, he looked around the room once again, trying to take it all in.
Trying to find something he’d missed.
He wasn’t sure what it was, as he’d scanned the dimly lit basement a thousand times already, but something was nagging at him. He wasn’t even sure if there was something he’d missed, but still…
That feeling .
Reggie had learned long ago to trust his gut in these situations. Heightened state of awareness, adrenaline pumping, on edge, waiting for something to snap.
The man in front of him now wasn’t going to snap. The man reminded Reggie of Joshua, actually. Darker skin and a foot taller, but he had the same calm, collected demeanor. Reggie had the impression that if he hadn’t barged into a room full of strangers who were now surrounding him and forcing him to talk, Derrick would be as quiet a man as Joshua.
So there was still something else… something in his subconscious urging him to analyze, just as he’d been trained.
What is it?
He looked around once again as Derrick delved into the history of the APS. Reggie had read the brief, but as a history buff he also knew much of the story already anyway. Benjamin Franklin and a handful of close Philadelphia friends started a group for thinking, discussing, and discourse, called The Junto, then through numerous years and iterations it became the original American Philosophical Society.
He made a mental note to check in with the story once it had come full-circle and Derrick explained what he’d meant when he’d told them of the “real” APS, and started walking toward the shelves along the side of the room.
The shelves were industrial-strength, the type of structure fit for an auto shop or a distribution warehouse. As such, they seemed out of place here in a relatively small basement. The floor plan didn’t support such massive shelves, and yet they were mostly full.
He stood beneath the first set of floor-to-ceiling shelves, admiring them. Each shelf was filled with office boxes, plastic tote containers, and some canvas bags.
Looks like a museum.
He peered into the first cardboard office box. Boxes, folders, and some canvas bags with tagged ends. Pretty much exactly what Reggie would have expected if they were in a museum.
Then it hit him.
This isn’t a museum.
Derrick looked at him, their eyes meeting. He knew Reggie had put it together. How could he be so dense? Daris had literally just told them upstairs: ‘this isn't a museum.’
So why does everything down here look like it belongs in a museum? He was standing in a basement with a trapdoor entrance, an exit via the stairs as well as one they hadn’t yet found, and he was surrounded by rows of shelves that would fit perfectly in the warehouse basement storage of the Louvre.
“It’s not a museum,” Reggie said.
Julie frowned, and Ben rolled his eyes.
“I know — Daris already told us that, but think about it. Why does it look exactly like a museum down here, if it’s not a museum? ”
“It’s just storage, possibly for —”
Reggie walked over to the box he’d peered into. “Look,” he said, holding up the first thing he grabbed. A clasp folder, filled with something bulky. He opened it and showed the others. “A fossil.” He grabbed the next folder and opened it. “Another one. Interesting.”
He returned the item and moved to the next box on the shelf. He pulled out a canvas bag, complete with the tag and label. Another fossil, this one larger and seemingly taken from the leg of a large animal.
“Everything down here belongs in a museum,” Reggie finally said. “Why would everything look like it came from a museum if it’s not a museum?”
“Like I said,” Julie said, “it could just be storage. Maybe these items are part of a collection, and they’re just being kept down here for —“
“It’s not storage for a museum,” Derrick said.
All eyes turned to him, still looming in the center of the room.
He continued. “It’s not a museum, per se, but rather the private collection of the American Philosophical Society.”
“But there’s nothing on display,” Julie said. “No way to see this stuff. Why would they want to hide it all?”
Reggie realized Julie had just answered her own question. The APS wants to hide this stuff because, well, they think it needs to be hidde
n.
Derrick once again met his gaze. Reggie walked back over to the group and stared back at the huge man. “This junk room is really where that journal was kept, wasn’t it? The journal that Daris says is Meriwether Lewis’ own private journal from the expedition, and the one she said had been ‘locked in the vault?’”
“She said that? There’s no vault here. Sounds like she was giving you the runaround.”
“Sounds like it. And so all the rest of this stuff is junk they — the APS — wanted to hide, presumably for the same reason they’ve been hiding the Lewis journal all these years.”
Again, Derrick nodded. Reggie looked around at the others quickly before adding, “and I don’t suppose you want to elaborate on any of that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Honestly, I’m not really sure why they’ve been hiding it all these years myself. I started investigating Daris on assignment, after she began working on the book she just released. I’ve known that she was APS for a while, and my office likes to keep tabs on people with the sort of influence she has.”
Julie frowned. “What sort of influence? And what book?”
“Actually, that’s why she will be on Good Morning America tomorrow morning,” Derrick said. “She’s a pretty big hitter in the realm of political blogging. Just released a book called The Jefferson Legacy.”
“‘Political blogging,’” Reggie said. “Sounds fun.”
Derrick shrugged. “Apparently there’s a lot of money in this stuff, and not just through advertising revenue. Her platform has thousands of supporters, and quite a few contributors as well. It’s been enough for her not to have to have another job.”
“So she’s definitely not a museum curator,” Ben said.
Derrick shook his head and laughed. “No, she is certainly not a museum curator.”
“Still,” Joshua said, “I don’t understand why this is all such a big deal. Why would she reach out to our boss to ask for help? Especially if she was just going to set us up, try to kill us, then disappear in a cloud of smoke?”
Reggie noticed Ben was staring at the space between two of the great shelves. He suddenly walked over and started feeling along the edges, near the sides of the shelves.
“What are you doing?” Reggie asked.
“She didn’t disappear into a cloud of smoke, actually,” Ben said. “She fell down the trapdoor, came down here, and then disappeared into… this .”
As he spoke the last few words he pushed on the wall with both hands and it fell away, swinging into a dark, rectangular hallway. The doorway had been cut into the wall of the basement and then covered in the same drywall and paint as the rest of the room, creating the effect of an ‘invisible’ door.
Ben stepped into the space revealed behind the door and Reggie saw that there was only enough room there for the door to swing open before the passageway ascended up a small set of stairs. Ben climbed the first two stairs then pushed up on a set of cellar doors. A sharp sting of daylight cut through the newly formed crack between the doors.
He dropped the door and stepped back into the room.
“Looks like it goes up and out to the parking lot,” he said. When he realized everyone was staring at him, he continued. “It was impossible to see,” he said, “except that there’s a faint line of dust along the top edge, where the door would have sucked in as it opened. Those old boxes near it on the shelves must be pretty dusty.”
Reggie followed Ben’s finger as he pointed at the line. It was just as Ben said — nearly impossible to see, and yet now that he was focusing on the spot it was impossible to miss.
“Wow,” he said. “Great catch.”
“Well we didn’t catch her,” Joshua said.
“Doesn’t matter now,” Roger Derrick said. “We know where she’ll be tomorrow morning, so we can just be ready to grab her after the show.”
“Why go through all this trouble?” Joshua asked again. “A building that’s not really a museum, a trapdoor in an office she bought in a catalog, a hidden doorway? It all seems so… elusive.”
“She’s certainly got a flair for the dramatic,” he said. “But the trapdoor and hidden cellar exit were probably here long before she was, probably something added during one of the many construction phases on this old building. And I honestly don’t know what her motives are. She’s been playing both sides of this thing since I’ve been watching her. Bringing you guys in here, telling you some of the story, then trying to shoot you. If I had to guess I’d say she wasn’t expecting anyone to come snooping around. Not you, and not me.”
“But then why would she tell someone else about the missing journal, and the missing artifact?” Julie asked.
Reggie hadn’t wanted to reveal that part of their story yet, as he still wasn’t sure how this Roger Derrick fellow fit in to it all. They didn’t have a lot of cards to play, so if it were up to him, he’d rather keep most of them close to his chest.
If Derrick was in fact FBI, he would be well-connected and well-resourced, which meant they were probably in good hands. But there were still downsides. Derrick wouldn’t be playing by the same rules, for starters, and he’d likely try to use his position to place himself in charge of the operation.
But if Derrick wasn’t FBI, what was he? Why was he interested in Daris, the non-museum they were in, and finding this journal?
Derrick began to answer Julie’s question. “Well, she’s involved with the APS, just as she said she was. My guess is that she needed some help, so she asked another member. That member was the man who told your boss about the situation.”
Reggie’s eyebrows rose in unison. Now we’re getting somewhere , he thought. “Okay, that makes a little more sense. So she didn’t want us here — we came anyway, and she had to act quickly to make sure it didn’t seem too far-fetched. The office furniture, the story, everything.”
“Right,” Derrick said. “She didn’t do a great job of it, either, but she’s still a step ahead of us.”
“So we need to find that journal,” Joshua said.
“And I need to find that woman,” Derrick added.
“Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a working partnership, then,” Reggie said. “You got someplace we can talk? Maybe somewhere a little less… dingy?”
Derrick smiled again, then walked over to the hidden door and toward the cellar stairs. Before he stepped out and into the small antechamber and onto the stairs, he turned back to the group. “I’ve got three rooms at the Rittenhouse. Will that work?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ALASTAIR JENKINS AND RENE VELACRUZ were brought into the gymnasium. As always, The Hawk stood at the far end, watching. Morrison met with the two men and their escorts — two more of The Hawk’s men — and led them to the center of the room.
“There’s only one chair, sir,” Morrison said into his throat mic.
“I can count, Morrison,” The Hawk replied. “Put Jenkins in the chair. He’s the newest to our team.”
Morrison nodded, then waited for Jenkins and his man to pass him, and he grabbed Jenkins’ arm and pulled him toward the center of the room. Alastair Jenkins was a Scotch-American, raised on the East Coast in some small town that might as well have been Boston, for as much as the kid talked about Boston.
The Hawk hadn’t taken a liking to him yet, which usually meant one thing: he was no good as a soldier or he was no good as an ally. This kid offered nothing The Hawk didn’t already have, and he had no significant skills or networks his other men lacked. He was worthless as an ally, therefore, and he needed considerable training before The Hawk would view him as a worthy soldier.
He had, therefore, been placed on recon duty. An important, yet highly mundane, responsibility. He’d paired Rene Velacruz, his second-youngest member of the team, with him. The pair should have made a decent reconnaissance team, but apparently that was not the case.
Now The Hawk would be forced to make an example out of them. The young men had applied for the position at The Hawk’s s
ecurity company, promising that they were worthy of the enlistment. His initial interviews and tests were passed easily by the two men, but the final test — the field test, as he called it — was now underway.
The Hawk had learned long ago that training a man in the ways of war was impossible. You simply had to place them in a live-fire mission and see how they did. Their ability to adapt, to grow, to learn — these were skills far more important than how straight they could shoot or how large a man they could tackle.
So the final test was straightforward: join the company on a mission, and a vote would be cast at the end of the excursion. If they passed, they were in. If they failed…
Well, by his measure, they had both just failed. Miserably.
To leave not only their main contact and boss unwatched — allowing her to escape without a tail — and to fail to determine the reason she had fled two hours earlier than their initial plan was worse than treason to The Hawk.
They had botched a simple, no-skill-needed reconnaissance mission, and they had been stupid enough to return to the gym afterward.
He strolled to the center of the room. Jenkins was wide-eyed, but Velacruz appeared to have no knowledge of the fact that he had failed his mission.
“Sit down, Jenkins,” he said. The Hawk watched as Morrison roughly pushed him down into the metal folding armchair, a thin built-in pad the only cushion provided.
Jenkins’ wide-eyed gaze eventually found The Hawk’s, and the boss smiled. “Welcome, Jenkins. Are you ready?”
Jenkins frowned, his eyes still falling out of his head. “Y — yes sir. Sir, it was an accident. We didn’t —”
“Save it, Jenkins,” Morrison said. “It’s too late for that.”
“But sir, I just want to —”
“I understand, Jenkins,” The Hawk said. “I really do. But there’s a lesson here, for all of us. It’s important, and you’re an integral part of that lesson.”