At the carrel before mine, he paused, and I tensed, ready to spring. Against his knife, I had only the carrel itself. I could push it into him, maybe knock him off balance long enough to make a run for it. It wasn’t much, but it was better than dying like a rat in a trap.
He took one step forward, and another—and then he brushed past my desk and kept going, striding to the end of the corridor without so much as a glance backward. Turning toward the main exit, he disappeared. Far away, I heard the sigh of a stairway door.
I let out a small sob of relief. Crawling out from under the carrel, I stood up. The desk had been bare when I’d ducked beneath it, but now a single sheet of paper floated like a sliver of moonlight on its dark surface. I picked it up. One side was rough and furred where it had been ripped from a book; the print looked old, and the paper was thick, creamy, and heavy. Not from a modern book.
I shifted to catch some stray light from outside. It was a page from the First Folio. An original—not one of the facsimiles like the one I’d found on Roz’s desk. That had been unmarked, in any case, and this one was not. In the right-hand margin, someone had drawn a hand, pointing left. A fisted hand, the forefinger pricking at a particular line, the thumb cocked upward, giving the hand the shape that modern children use to mimic guns. It was an old figure, though, the mark readers long ago made to jog memory—the medieval and Renaissance version of a highlighter. I looked closer. The shape might be old, but the mark was new, made with a blotchy ballpoint rather than the thin wash of a quill or a fountain pen.
I glanced over at the line, and felt suddenly queasy. It wasn’t a line, exactly, but a stage direction. Not from Hamlet. From Titus Andronicus—the cruelest moment in Shakespeare’s cruelest play. Violence so brutal it ripped a black hole in the belly. So brutal that not even Shakespeare had tried to put it into poetry: Enter Lavinia, tongue cut out, hands cut off, and ravish’d.
“What’s in a name?” my stalker had hissed. “Maybe we should change yours.”
To Lavinia?
“Kate,” said a man’s voice over my shoulder. I screamed, and a hand clamped over my mouth.
11
“BE QUIET AND listen,” said a low British voice. “Roz sent me.” I lunged away, but he caught me and spun me around. Held tight against him, I was aware of dark curly hair, a long straight nose, and a body so hard it might have been carved from marble, except that it was warm.
“Roz is dead,” I said.
“She didn’t listen.”
I jerked away; again he wrenched me back. This time his eyes bored into mine. “If you open it, you must follow where it leads.”
Roz’s words. I went still. “Who are you?”
“Ben Pearl,” he said tersely. “Sorry about the lapse in manners, but I’m trying to get you out of here alive. Given that I’d like to leave in some other direction than your stalker, what are our options?” His accent was sleek, with the casual arrogance of the British upper class. His face and arms were bare, and his T-shirt was gray. The whisperer in the dark, on the other hand, had been clothed head to toe in black, and his accent had been American.
“Why should I trust you?”
“She was my aunt, Kate.”
“You’re British.”
“People cross oceans. She was my mother’s sister and hired me to protect you.”
He had dark hair and green eyes, as she’d had. “Let me go,” I insisted.
But his grip only tightened. “Quiet.” His eyes flickered past me out the window. I followed his gaze. Outside, a globe of hazy yellow light swelled upward from a lamppost. Below that, the darkness rippled like water or mist churning in a wake.
“Is it him?” I whispered.
He eased us away from the window, across the corridor. “Not unless he’s cloned himself a dozen times over,” he said quietly as we slid into the shadows of the stacks. “My guess is it’s the university police responding to the blackout. The main exit’s out. What are the alternatives?”
“There’s the back door, just below us. Five floors down.”
He shook his head. “Probably right where those coppers are headed.”
I bit my lip. “There’s an exit from Pusey. The library next door.”
“Good.”
“But it comes out right around the corner from Widener’s front door.”
He shot me a look of exasperation. “This is Harvard, for Christ’s sake. Aren’t there any hidden doors or secret tunnels?”
“One,” I said slowly. “At least, there used to be. It’s a tunnel under the Yard to Lamont, the undergrad library.” When I’d begun as a graduate student, that tunnel had been open to anyone in the university, and in the dreary months between the New Year and spring break, it had become something of an underground highway. But in my second year, a slasher had begun leaving trails of intricately carved pages through the lesser-known aisles of the library. For a time, he’d been the stuff of jokes. The Minotaur, he’d been christened, the monster in the maze. Officially, Harvard’s only response had been to recommend that students head into the labyrinth of the stacks in groups of two or more. Unofficially, research in Widener more or less came to a standstill.
As crocuses poked up through the snow, undercover police infiltrated the stacks, and one morning we woke to the news that a small, strange man with the eyes of a snake had been caught—and that the Lamont tunnel had been permanently closed. Rumors rumbled among the students that it had not been a cop who caught the slasher at all, but a priest, and that a titanic battle had doused the whole length of the tunnel with blood that would not wash clean. Harvard, of course, did not deign to address such superstition directly. Instead, the university relentlessly erased the tunnel from every map, censored every mention of it in print, even sowed silence among the faculty and staff. Within four years, its very existence had largely been wiped from the student body’s collective memory.
“Brilliant,” said Ben. “That’s our baby.”
“If it still exists,” I said uneasily.
“It will,” he said simply. “It has to. Do you have everything you brought in with you, Professor?”
In answer, I marched back to the aisle where I’d hidden the book, and pulled it off the shelf.
“Anything else?”
“I didn’t—” My voice died in midsentence. My bag. I’d left it in Roz’s office, with my wallet and all my ID…no wonder the killer knew my name. I’d left him a calling card. I felt myself flush. “I left my bag in Roz’s office. And I’m not a goddamn professor,” I added shortly. “Never was.”
“You don’t believe in making things easy, do you?” Pulling me up through an aisle, he glanced up and down the corridor lined with studies. “That it?” he whispered, pointing to the lone door standing ajar.
Wresting myself away from him, I tore across the corridor to the door. Just inside, I stopped.
The room had been ripped apart. The wingback chair lay overturned in its corner, its cushions slashed. Books lay jumbled in a high heap in the middle of the room. On the desk, the computer screen had been shattered. On the wall behind it, Roz’s two maps were torn end to end. Except for the blind screen, everything else on the desk was more or less intact: the turquoise earrings still lay draped by the keyboard, and the reference books stood shoulder to shoulder along the back wall. But for one gap. I’d put Roz’s facsimile of the First Folio back where I’d found it; now it was gone. He’d known what he wanted, and he’d got it. The rest of the mess was mindless vandalism.
My bag was perched at a crazy angle on the near slope of the mound of books. The neat desk, the bag so carefully posed, all pointed at one thing. Far from mindless vandalism, this was desecration—a cruel and deliberate wreck of her memory. And I was meant to see it.
A low thud jarred through my thoughts. In the same instant, Ben grabbed my arm, hurtling me backward into the stacks. The book sailed from my hands. I was scrambling after it when he flung himself on top of me. A bright flash split the darkness, a
nd all the glass in the corridor shattered in a high shriek. A deep reverberating boom spread through the building.
Gradually the sound died away. Above me, Ben pushed himself up. The marble floor felt oddly cool against my cheek. I lifted my head. Ten feet away, the volume of Chambers lay open, facedown on the floor. Like a cursed jewel, a shard of glass had imbedded itself in the front cover. Scrambling over to retrieve it, I riffled through the pages. Roz’s paper was still wedged in near the back.
Ben said something, but his voice sounded far away, heard through fog, and I couldn’t make out his words. I looked up blankly. In three strides, he crossed to me. His hands skimmed down my back; he wheeled me around and looked me over from head to toe. “You’re fine. Stay here.”
He crossed back to the study and disappeared inside.
Against orders, I inched close enough to peer into the study. Ben stood backlit by fire, studying my bag, which now lay beneath twisted chunks of masonry and steel. All Roz’s windows had blown in, sugaring the room with glass. Beyond, I could see a hole in the wall across the courtyard, the room within glowering an angry orange. Amid the smoke, bits of paper floated and swirled through the courtyard like blazing snow.
Leveraging a steel beam from my bag, Ben picked it up and came back. “Is that it, or have you strung another Kate Was Here sign up in lights somewhere else?”
I shook my head.
“Right, then. Let’s go.”
But I stood rooted in place.
“Go.” Ben herded me roughly toward the stairs. Sliding in front, he led me quickly down one flight, and then another. In one hand he held a black semiautomatic pistol. Sirens wailed in some unseen distance. The fitful glare of the fire filtered eerily down through the courtyard, lighting our way until we reached the ground floor. Below that, even the faintest glimmer of light died. Step by step, we felt our way downward in utter darkness. Around us, the whole building began to groan and clank; I tried not to think of three and a half million books slowly collapsing their shelves floor by floor over our heads. We passed floor A, and then B. “This is it,” I whispered as we came to C.
Then I realized my mistake. Unlike the upper floors, which had wide corridors running the length of the building, east to west, the underground floors were divided in half; on this floor, only a short, narrow bottleneck of a passage led from the western section, where we stood, to the eastern section—and the door to the tunnel. Worse, it was hidden behind a bookshelf. I hadn’t known this part of the library well by daylight five years ago; now, in the dark, that passage was going to be hell to find.
Ben set a flashlight in my hand. With a click, light shot into the distance. Wordlessly, he reached out and bent my wrist so that the beam focused, slightly more discreetly, on the floor a few feet ahead of us. I took a few tentative steps down the main corridor. Rank upon rank of shelves stretched before us, looming tall, even seeming to peer suspiciously down at us as I swept the beam across them; after the ribbon of light had passed, I had the sense that they shifted, cornering and veering off in different directions. Which aisle did I want? The first one I tried dead-ended in a wall of books on Magellan. The second came to a halt at the Conquest of the Inca. I slunk back out and stood in the corridor.
“Speed,” murmured Ben. “Speed would be good.”
“You’ll like accuracy better.”
I’d discovered that passage by accident, while looking for something else. What had I been looking for?
Roz. Roz had sent me. I’d been writing a paper on the serpentine treasons of the Howards—one of the most ruthless families of Renaissance England, long known to be in Spanish pay. “The serpentine treasons of my forebears, you mean,” Roz had said, dropping a hint that brought me down here. It hadn’t panned out; I’d found no trace of the Howards. But behind a shelf full of old Spanish gossip—diaries, dispatches, and court papers carefully transcribed and published long ago by gentlemen scholars and left ever since to molder in out-of-the-way corners—I’d found that passage to C East.
I shone the light down another aisle: not the one. And another. I walked on, and then turned back. Yes, this one looked familiar. I walked a ways in, picking up speed as my sense of recognition grew. Yes, this was it.
In the distance, a door squeaked. With Ben right behind me, I switched off the light, groping my way forward until I felt books just in front of my nose. Reaching to the right, I felt the shelf turn in a closed corner. Damn. Shifting the book from one hand to the other, I reached to the left.
A few aisles away, I heard an indistinct thud, and then a faint beam of red light swept across the ceiling. I stilled—the killer had used a red flashlight. Ben tapped my shoulder, and I knew what he meant. Go on. Skimming over the rippling spines of unseen books, my fingers suddenly slid into empty space. I squeezed into the gap, carefully working my way around the shelf. It stood forward a few feet from the back wall of the building; I let my hands spider along the wall, searching for the opening I prayed was still there.
I came on it so quickly that I stumbled and nearly fell through; the book slipped from my hands. Lunging blindly, I caught it just before it hit the floor, wincing in pain as the glass imbedded in the cover slit into my palm. Ducking in behind me, Ben hauled me to my feet. “Nice catch,” he whispered.
Footsteps walked halfway up the aisle behind us and stopped. Red light oozed between the books on the shelf shielding us—enough to see that the passage we were in opened onto a corridor trailing eastward in a straight shot. The light went out and the footsteps turned back the way they’d come. I let out my breath. As fast as we dared, we crept east until I felt the cross draft of an intersection.
Turning right, I kept going till we came to a blank wall. Set back in the corner, in a small niche screened by a row of old, unused carrels, was a heavy metal door. With dismay, I saw that it had been fitted with an electronic lock. Then the door bounced ever so slightly, like a screen door gusting in a breeze. The loss of power must have released the catch.
Ben yanked the door open, and hot, humid darkness belched outward, faintly rotten with the stench of sulfur. I shone the flashlight inside, but the beam faded to nothing only a few feet in.
I took a step back. What’s in a name? the killer had said. Perhaps we should change yours. In Titus, Lavinia and her lover had been lured to a dark, deserted pit before her rape. He had died; she had begged to die. I looked again into the tunnel and took another step back.
Footsteps pattered across the floor above. Down the hall, a door opened. Another voice flickered up out of the past. Follow where it leads. Tightening my grip on the book, I walked forward into the tunnel. Slipping the flashlight from my hand and switching it off, Ben closed the door and the darkness leapt at our throats.
12
BEN BRUSHED PAST me, moving up the tunnel. Gripping the book with one hand, I reached up with the other to skim along the wall, hurrying to catch up. The walls here were lined with gigantic pipes, some warm, some vibrating, others dead. Shuffling to keep from tripping, we sped on as fast as we could through the blind dark; my eyes pressed so hard against the darkness that I thought they’d squeeze from their sockets.
A ways on, the tunnel angled to the right; just past this turn, Ben stopped.
“What—?” I began, but he cut me off.
“Close your eyes and listen.”
Instantly, my eyes relaxed and I could concentrate on what I heard, instead of what I could not see—and what I heard behind us was a quiet shuffling of footsteps.
Wordlessly, we picked up our pace to something just under a run. A growl rose in the distance, then a humming ran through the pipes, lights flickered through the tunnel, and I realized what was happening. Someone had finally reached the electricity; if it went on before we reached the door, it would lock and we’d be trapped.
“Run!” I cried, but Ben needed no urging. The lights flickered again, and this time, I saw the end of the tunnel—still fifteen feet out of reach.
“Stop,
” blared an amplified voice far behind.
Three more steps, and Ben launched himself into the air, hurtling against the door. It crashed open, and I ran through it. Ben ducked through after me and shoved the door shut. The lock clicked into place.
We stood panting in a cavernous basement that was little more than a garishly lit storage room filled with shelves. The only other door led to a stairwell. Two flights up we emerged onto a dim landing on the ground floor of Lamont. To the right was an alcove with copy machines. To the left stretched an abandoned checkout desk and a glass door leading onto a small porch. EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND, read a sign that hung on the door. Beyond the door, it seemed that every alarm on campus was already ringing.
“Think anyone’ll notice?” shouted Ben.
I pushed past him into the night. We stood on a tiny concrete porch overgrown with ivy. Overhead, another alarm bell joined in the din, but whether anyone could tell even five feet away was doubtful. We turned a corner and I stopped in my tracks.
A small crowd huddled on a path up ahead, but no one turned; for one thing, they couldn’t possibly have heard us through that bloodcurdling storm of noise. For another, they were all staring openmouthed up toward Widener, where a pillar of smoke slashed with flame was pouring up through the library’s central courtyard.
Suddenly I realized what lay pinned at the red heart of that fire: Harry Widener’s study. “The books,” I gasped. All those beautiful, irreplaceable books. That’s what I had seen floating, flaming, through Roz’s blown-out windows: pages from Widener’s precious collection of rare books.
“Better than people,” said Ben grimly.
Then it hit me, exactly which books. “My God,” I gasped. “The First Folio.” I’d looked at it just that afternoon. In the rotunda right outside that study.
The Globe’s Folio, too, had gone up in a tower of flame. In a flash, I understood that the bastard responsible was willing to kill, to burn whole buildings, just to destroy Folios. And the Folios—or at least a Folio, a particular copy—was the Jacobean magnum opus referred to by Roz. The key, somehow, to her discovery. Which meant he wasn’t just keeping Roz and me from reaching her treasure, whatever it was. He was wiping out all possible paths to it.
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