The Collectors

by David Baldacci

  Jewell English had answered Caleb’s phone call and seemed delighted that he’d found her glasses. Tonight would be fine regardless of the late hour, she’d said. “I don’t sleep much,” she confided to Caleb on the phone. “But I might be in my nightgown,” she added in a girlish voice.

  “That’s nice,” he’d answered dully.

  As he walked toward her home, he took note of the other houses. They were all aged tiny brick ranches with cookie-cutter yards and darkened interiors. A cat snuck across one lawn, startling him. He took several deep breaths and muttered, “She’s just an old lady who lost her glasses. Just an old lady who lost her glasses. Just an old lady who could be a spy with henchmen waiting to slit my throat.” He glanced back at the car. He couldn’t see Milton but assumed his sidekick was busily snapping photos of a suspicious-looking robin lurking on a tree branch.

  The lights were on in Jewell’s home. He could see lace curtains in the windows and through the big living room glass, knickknacks and bric-a-brac positioned on the painted fireplace mantel. There was no car in the rusty carport. He assumed she’d either quit driving or her ride was in the repair shop. Her lawn was neatly cut, and two columns of rosebushes guarded the front of her house. He rang the bell and waited. No one came. He rang it again. No footsteps reached his ears. He glanced around. The street was empty, quiet. Maybe too quiet, as they say in the movies; right before you’re shot, stabbed or eaten.

  He’d called her a little over an hour ago. What could have happened in the interim? He’d heard the bell buzz, but maybe she couldn’t hear it. He knocked on the door, hard. “Jewell?” He said her name again, louder. From somewhere a dog started barking, and he jumped. It wasn’t from inside the house, though, probably a neighbor’s mutt. He knocked again, harder, and the door swung open.

  He turned, poised to run. You never ever went into a house when the door just opened like that. The next sound nearly pushed his heart into defib.

  “Caleb?”

  He shrieked and grabbed the handrail on the front stoop to avoid pitching over into the bushes in his fright.

  “Caleb!” the voice said again urgently.

  “What? Who? Dear God!” He spun frantically around trying to see who was calling his name, his feet slipping and sliding on the damp concrete. He became so dizzy, he was almost sick to his stomach.

  “It’s me, Milton.”

  Caleb froze in a half-squat, his hands clamped to his thighs as he desperately tried to keep from heaving his dinner into the fragrant roses. “Milton?”

  “Yes!”

  “Where are you?” he hissed.

  “I’m still in the car. I’m speaking to you through the wire. It has communication capability as well as being a surveillance device.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I did. I guess you forgot. I know you’re under pressure.”

  “You can hear me clearly?” Caleb said between gritted teeth.

  “Oh, yes, very clear.”

  The language that erupted from the staid librarian would have caused the filthiest rap singer in the world to concede his lewd speech title to Mr. Caleb Shaw.

  There was a long pause after this explosion. Finally, a stunned Milton said, “I can tell you’re a little upset.”

  “Yep!” Caleb took a deep breath and willed his food to remain in his belly. He slowly stood erect and stretched out his back even as his poor heart continued to race. If he keeled over with a coronary right now, Caleb swore he’d come back and haunt the little techno-geek every second of every day.

  “Okay, she’s not answering. I just knocked on the door, and it swung open. What would you suggest I do?”

  “I’d leave right now,” Milton answered automatically.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Caleb started to back down the steps, afraid to turn around lest something leap out at him from the house. Then he stopped. What if she was lying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip or had suffered a heart attack? The thing was, despite the evidence, part of Caleb could not believe that the same sweet lady who was such an enthusiastic lover of books could be wrapped up in the spy business. Or if she was, maybe she was simply an innocent dupe.

  “Caleb? Have you left yet?”

  “No,” he snapped. “I’m thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “About whether I should go in and check on her.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  He hesitated. Milton did have a Taser gun. If Jewell were a spy and came at them with a meat cleaver, they could take the old crone down, hard.

  “No, Milton, just stay put. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Caleb pushed open the door and went in. The living room was empty, as was the small kitchen. There was a frying pan on the stove with bits of onion and what looked like ground beef; this matched the aroma in the air. There was one plate, a cup and a fork in the sink, all dirty. On the way back through the living room he picked up a heavy brass candleholder as a weapon and moved slowly down the hallway. He reached the bathroom first and looked in. The toilet seat was down, the shower curtain open, and no bloody body was lying in the tub. He didn’t check the medicine cabinet primarily because he didn’t want to see how absolutely terrified he looked in the mirror.

  The first bedroom was empty, the small closet full of towels and bedsheets.

  There was only one room left. He hoisted the candleholder above his head and nudged the door open with his foot. It was dark inside, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. His breath left him in a rush. There was a lump under the bedcover.

  He whispered, “There’s someone in the bed. The covers are over her face.”

  “Is she dead?” Milton asked.

  “I don’t know, but why would she be asleep with the covers over her face?”

  “Should I call the police?”

  “Just hang on a sec.”

  There was a small closet in the room, its door partially open. Caleb stood to one side, his candleholder at the ready. He again used his foot to push the door open and then jumped back. A short rack of clothes hung there without a murderer in sight.

  He turned back to the bed, his heart beating so fast, he wondered if he should have Milton call an ambulance for him. He looked down at his shaky hands. “Okay, okay, a dead body can’t hurt you.” Still, he didn’t want to see her, not like that. He suddenly realized something. If they had killed her, he was partly responsible, for taking her glasses and exposing the old woman. This somber thought depressed but also calmed him somewhat.

  “I’m sorry, Jewell, even if you were a spy,” he mumbled solemnly.

  He gripped the top of the bedcover and jerked it down.

  A dead man stared up at him. It was Norman Janklow, the Hemingway lover and Jewell English’s nemesis in the Rare Books reading room.

  CHAPTER 57

  ALBERT TRENT LIVED IN AN OLD house with a broad front porch set far back from a rural road in western Fairfax County.

  “Must be a hike for him to get into D.C. every day from here,” Stone noted as he eyeballed the place with a pair of binoculars from behind a copse of towering river birch. Annabelle, dressed in black jeans, dark tennis shoes and a black hooded jacket, crouched next to him. Stone carried a small knapsack.

  “Does it look occupied?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No lights that I can see from here, but the garage is closed, so we can’t tell if there’s a car in there.”

  “A guy in the intelligence field probably has an alarm system.”

  Stone nodded. “I would be stunned if he didn’t. We’ll disable that first, before we go inside.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “As I once told Reuben when he asked me that, the library is open to everyone.”

  There wasn’t another house within their line of sight, but they still approached the rear of the house to avoid being seen. This required crawling on their bellies, then their knees, and finally crab-walkin
g down a gentle slope twenty yards from the house. They halted here and Stone took another reconnoiter. The home had a walk-out basement with a pressure-treated deck on one end. The back was as dark as the front. With no streetlights and just a dash of ambient light, Stone’s night binoculars were working optimally. Through the green haze of the coated optics he could see everything he needed to.

  “I’m not spotting any movement, but make the call anyway,” he told Annabelle.

  Milton had gotten Trent’s home phone number off the Internet, a far more dangerous threat to America’s privacy than the poor National Security Agency ever thought of being. Annabelle used her cell phone to call. After four rings the voice mail kicked in, and they listened to a man’s voice instructing them to leave a message.

  “Our spy seems to be out in the cold tonight,” she said. “Are you armed?”

  “I don’t own a gun. You?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not into that. I go for brains over bullets.”

  “Good, guns aren’t great things to be into.”

  “You sound like you speak from experience.”

  “Now is not the time to swap life stories.”

  “I know, I’m just foreshadowing for when will be a good time.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be sticking around after this.”

  “I didn’t think I’d be sticking around for this. So you never know.”

  “Okay, the phone box is hanging on a foundation wall underneath the deck. Let’s move, keep it nice and slow.”

  As they crawled forward, a horse whinnied somewhere in the distance. There were small family farms scattered around here, though they were being rapidly ground under by northern Virginia’s colossal residential housing machine that randomly spit out condos, town houses, modest single-family homes and mansions with numbing speed. They’d passed several such farms on the way to Trent’s place, all of which had stalls, hay bales, paddocks and large critters nibbling grass. Fat piles of horse manure left on the streets had served as an exclamation point for the equines’ presence. Stone had almost stepped in some getting out of Annabelle’s rental car.

  They reached the phone box, and Stone spent five minutes evaluating the security system hardwired into it, and took another five minutes to disable it. After he’d rerouted the last wire, he said, “Let’s try the window right here. The doors probably have dead bolts. I brought a tool to force them, but let’s take the point of least resistance first.”

  That point was not the window, which was nailed shut.

  They moved down the rear of the house and finally found one window that was secured with window pins. Stone cut a circle of glass out, reached in, pulled out the pins and popped the lock. A minute later they were roaming down the hallway toward what looked to be the kitchen, with Stone in the lead holding a flashlight.

  “Nice place, but he appears to be a minimalist,” Annabelle noted. Trent’s taste in interior decoration did tend toward the spartan: a chair here, a table there. The kitchen was barren.

  Stone said, “He’s a bachelor. He probably eats out a lot.”

  “Where do you want to start?”

  “Let’s see if he has an office of some kind here. Most D.C. bureaucrats tend to bring their work home.”

  They found the office, but it was nearly as bare as the rest of the house, no papers or files. There were some photos on the credenza behind the desk. Stone pointed to one. A big, bearish man with a bluff, honest face, white hair and thick gray eyebrows was standing next to a smaller, flabby man with a bad comb-over but who possessed a pair of cagey brown eyes and a furtive expression.

  Stone said, “The big man is Bob Bradley. Trent’s next to him.”

  “Trent looks like a little weasel.” She stiffened. “What’s that vibrating sound?”

  “Damn, that’s my phone.” Stone unclipped his cell and looked at the screen. “It’s Caleb. I wonder what they found.”

  He never got a chance to hear.

  The heavy blow from behind knocked Stone unconscious.

  Annabelle let out a scream an instant before a wet cloth held by a very strong hand covered her mouth and nose. As she breathed in the chemical fumes and started to collapse, her gaze fell on a mirror hanging on a wall across the room. In the reflection she could see two men wearing black masks. One had her, and the other was standing over Stone. And behind them she saw a third man. It was the man in the picture, Albert Trent. He smiled, not realizing she had seen his reflection. Within a few moments her eyelids started fluttering, then closed, and she became limp.

  In accordance with Roger Seagraves’ instructions, one of the men removed the watch from Annabelle’s wrist. Seagraves already had a shirt of Stone’s. Although he was not killing them himself, Seagraves was orchestrating their deaths, which satisfied his collection criteria. He would especially covet the addition of a Triple Six, a first for his collection. Seagraves intended on giving it a particularly special place of honor.

  CHAPTER 58

  ANNABELLE REGAINED CON-sciousness first. As her eyes came into focus, she saw the two men working away. One stood on a ladder while the other one was handing him things. She was lying bound hand and foot on a cold concrete floor. Directly across and facing her was Stone, his eyes closed. As she watched, his eyelids fluttered several times and then remained open. When he saw her, her gaze directed him to the two men. Their mouths weren’t bound, but neither wanted to alert their captors that they were awake.

  As Stone took in the room, his belly tensed. They were being held in the storage room at Fire Control, Inc. He squinted to see the label on the cylinder the men were preparing overhead. It was suspended from the ceiling by chains, which was why they were using a ladder to reach it.

  “Carbon dioxide, five thousand ppm,” he mouthed as Annabelle tried to understand him.

  The men were going to kill them the same way Jonathan DeHaven had died.

  Stone looked frantically around for something, anything, he could use to cut through his bindings. They probably wouldn’t have much time after the men had left the room before the gas would shoot out of the cylinder and devour the oxygen in the air, leaving them to suffocate. He spotted it about the time the men finished their work.

  “That should do it,” one of them said, climbing down.

  As the man stepped into the wash of the overhead light, Stone recognized him. It was the foreman from the team that had removed the cylinders from the library.

  When the men glanced over, Stone instantly closed his eyes. Acting on his cue, Annabelle did likewise.

  “Okay,” the foreman said, “let’s not waste time. The gas release triggers in three minutes. We’ll let it clear out and then get them out of here.”

  “Where are we dumping them?” the other man said.

  “A real out-of-the-way place. But it won’t matter if they’re found. The cops won’t be able to tell how they died. That’s what’s so sweet about this setup.”

  They grabbed the ladder and left. The instant the two men shut and locked the door behind them, Stone sat up and slid on his butt over to the worktable. He levered himself up, snatched a box cutter off the table, sat back down and propelled back over to Annabelle.

  He whispered, “Quick, take this knife and cut through my ropes. Hurry! We’ve got less than three minutes.”

  As they lay back-to-back, Annabelle moved the blade up and down as quickly as she could from such an awkward position. Once, she hit flesh and heard Stone grunt in pain, but he said, “Keep going, don’t worry about that. Hurry! Hurry!” His eyes were on the suspended cylinder. Facing the way he was, he could see what Annabelle couldn’t. There was a timer on the cylinder, and it was counting down fast.

  Annabelle cut as quickly as she could until she felt her arms would drop from her shoulders. Sweat was leaching into her eyes from the effort.

  Finally, Stone felt the rope start to give way. They had one minute left. He pulled his hands apart, giving her more room to work. She cut more and the rop
es fell completely away. Stone sat up, undid the bindings on his feet and jumped up. He made no attempt to reach the cylinder. It was too high up, and even if he could get to it and figure out how to stop the countdown, the men would know something was wrong when they didn’t hear the gas release. He grabbed the oxygen tank and face mask that he’d seen on his previous visit and raced to Annabelle’s side. They had thirty seconds.

  He grabbed her bound hands and slid Annabelle to a far corner behind a pile of equipment. He threw a tarp over them, placed his head next to Annabelle’s, strapped the large oxygen shield over both their faces and turned on the feed line. A low hiss and the feeling of a light breeze in their faces showed that the line was working.

  A moment later they heard a sound like a small explosion followed by the roar of a waterfall up close. For ten long seconds it continued, the CO2 coming out so fast and furiously that it covered the entire room almost instantly. As the “snow effect” took place, the temperature dropped dramatically, and Stone and Annabelle began to shake uncontrollably. They sucked deeply on the life-giving oxygen. Yet on the fringes of the air pocket provided by the O2 Stone could feel the draining clutches of an atmosphere that was far closer to the moon’s than Earth’s. It tore at them, trying to rip the molecules of oxygen away, but Stone kept the mask crushed to their faces even as Annabelle gripped him with the strength of extreme panic.

  Despite the supply of oxygen, Stone’s thoughts still became muddled. He felt as though he were in a fighter jet soaring ever higher, the g-forces pulling his face back and up, threatening to rip his head off. Stone could only imagine the horror that Jonathan DeHaven, who’d had no