Library of the Dead

by Glenn Cooper

  "I'm sorry, who?"

  "They killed my girlfriend!" Mark cried, then lowered his voice again. "She didn't know anything. They didn't have to do that. And the thing is, I could have looked both of them up early on. By the time I thought to do it…"

  The lightbulb went off in Will's head, a delayed reaction. "Jesus! Nelson Elder-life insurance!"

  Mark nodded. "I met him at a casino. He was a nice guy. Then I found out his company was in trouble, and what better way to help a life insurance company than tell them when people are going to die? That was my big idea. He saw it right away."

  "How much?"

  "Money?"

  "Yeah, money."

  "Five million dollars."

  "You gave away the crown jewels for a lousy five million?"

  "No! It was very discreet. He gave me names, I gave him dates. That was it. It was a good deal for everyone. I kept the database. Nobody's got it but me."

  "The whole thing?"

  "Just the United States. Desert Life only does business in the U.S. The whole database was too big to steal."

  Will was swimming in a stew of information overload and raging emotions. "There's a little more to this, an extra little wrinkle, isn't there?"

  Mark was silent, fidgeting with his hands.

  "You wanted to stick it to me, didn't you? You chose New York for your charade because that's my patch. You wanted me to eat shit. Didn't you?"

  Mark hung his head in childlike contrition. "I've always been jealous," he whispered. "When we roomed together, I mean, I never knew anyone like you in high school. Everything you did worked out great. Everything I did…" His voice trailed off to nothing. "When I saw you last year, it reopened things."

  "We were just freshman roommates, Mark. Nine months together, when we were kids. We were very different people."

  Mark made a forlorn admission, choking back emotion. "I was hoping you'd want to room with me after freshman year. You helped them. You helped them tape me to my bed."

  Will's skin crawled. The man was pathetic. Nothing about his actions or intentions had a trace of nobility. It was all about self-loathing, self-pity, and infantile urges wrapped in a surfeit of IQ points. Okay, the kid had been traumatized, and okay, he'd always felt guilty about his role, but it was an innocent college prank, for Christ's sake! The man holed up in this hotel room was loathsome and dangerous, and he had to quash a powerful desire to lay him out with a blow to his sharp, thin jaw.

  In one fell swoop this pitiable creature had turned his own life on its ear. He didn't want to be involved with any of this. All he'd wanted was to retire and be left alone. But it was obvious that once you knew about the Library, things could never be the same. He needed to think, but first he needed to survive.

  "Tell me something, Mark, did you look me up?" he said confrontationally. "Do I get taken out today?" As he waited for the answer, he thought, If it's yes, who gives a shit? What do I have to live for anyway? I'll only screw up Nancy's life the way I screwed up everyone else's. Bring it on!

  "No. Me neither. We're both BTH."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Beyond the horizon. The books stop in 2027. Area 51 had a life expectancy of eighty years."

  "Why do they stop?"

  "We don't know. There was evidence of a fire at the monastery. Natural disaster? Something political? Religious? There's no way of knowing. It's just a fact."

  "So, I live past 2027," Will said wistfully.

  "I do too," Mark reminded him. "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Okay."

  "Did you figure out it was me? Is that why they're looking for you too?"

  "I did. I nailed your ass."

  "How?" Will could see how badly he wanted to know. "I'm sure I didn't leave any tracks."

  "I found your screenplay in the WGA registry. First draft, bunch of uninteresting character names. Second draft, bunch of very interesting names. You had to tell somebody, didn't you? Even if it was a private joke."

  Mark was astonished. "What gave you the idea?"

  "The font on the postcards. It's not used that much these days unless you're writing screenplays."

  Mark sputtered, "I had no idea."

  "Of what?"

  "That you were that smart."

  As Frazier sat in front of his terminal, he willed himself into a state of optimism. They had Will's cell phone blip on the screen again, his men were in proximity, and he reminded himself that none of his operatives were going to die today and neither was Shackleton or Piper. The inescapable conclusion was that the operation was going to be smooth and that both men would be reeled in for interrogation. What happened to them afterward was clearly not going to be up to him. They were BTH, so he imagined they'd be defanged one way or another. He didn't much care.

  His optimism was shaken by DeCorso. "Malcolm, here's the story," he heard through his headset. "This is a hotel, the Beverly Hills Hotel. It's got a few hundred rooms on twelve acres. The beacon we've got is accurate to about three hundred yards. We don't have the manpower to box him in and search the hotel."

  "For fuck's sake," Frazier said. "Can't we boost the signal somehow?"

  One of the Ops Center techs answered without looking up from his screen, "Call his phone. If he answers, we can triangulate him to fifty feet."

  Frazier's mouth curled into a Cheshire smile. "You fucking all-star. I'm going to buy you a case of beer." He reached for a phone and hit the button for an outside line.

  Will's prepaid phone rang. He thought of Nancy. He wanted to hear her voice, and didn't pay attention to the caller ID tag: OUT OF AREA. "Hello?" No one answered. "Nancy?" Nothing.

  He hung up.

  "Who was it?" Mark asked.

  "I don't like it," Will answered. He looked at his phone, grimaced and turned it off. "I think we should leave. Get your stuff."

  Mark looked scared. "Where are we going?"

  "I don't know yet. Somewhere out of L.A. They know I'm here so they know you're here. We'll get a cab to my car and start driving. Couple of smart guys, we should be able to figure something out."

  Mark stooped to pack his laptop away. Will was towering over him. "What?" Mark said, alarmed.

  "I'm taking your briefcase."

  "Why?"

  Will gave him a brawn over brains look. "Because I want it. I'm not asking again. And I want your password."

  "No! You'll ditch me."

  "I won't do that."

  "How do I know?"

  The slender man looked so frightened and vulnerable that Will took pity on him for the first time. "Because I'm giving you my word. Look, if both of us have the password, it increases the chance I can use it as leverage to get you back if we get split up. It's the right move."

  "Pythagoras."

  "Come again?"

  "The Greek mathematician, Pythagoras."

  "Does that have some significance?"

  Before Mark could answer, Will heard a scraping sound from the patio and drew his pistol.

  The front door and the patio door blew in simultaneously.

  The room was suddenly full of men.

  For a participant, close-quarter firefights seem to last forever, but to an external observer like Frazier, who had an audio feed, it was over in under ten seconds.

  DeCorso saw Will's weapon and started shooting. The first round buzzed past Will's ear.

  Will dived onto the tangerine carpet and returned fire from a low angle, aiming at chests and abdomens, big body masses, jerking his trigger as fast as he could. He'd only fired his weapon in action once before, at a very bad highway stop in Florida, his second year as a deputy sheriff. Two men went down that day. They were easier to hit than fox squirrels.

  DeCorso fell first, causing a moment of disarray among his men. The watchers' guns were fitted with silencers, so the bullets didn't pop, but thwacked into wood, furniture, and flesh. In contrast, Will's gun boomed every time he pulled the trigger, and Frazier winced at each one, eighteen blasts, till
the room fell silent.

  By then, it was filled with caustic blue fumes and the tart smell of gunpowder. Will could hear a tinny voice yelling hysterically into a headset that was lying on the floor, separated from its man.

  Everywhere, the primary color of blood was clashing with the suite's pastel hues. Four intruders were on the floor, two moaning, two silent. Will rose to his knees, then haltingly stood on rubbery legs. He didn't feel any pain but had heard that adrenaline could temporarily mask even a serious wound. He checked himself for blood, but he was clean. Then he saw Mark's feet behind the sofa and scrambled to help him up.

  Christ, he thought when he saw him. Christ. There was a hole in his head the size of a wine cork, bubbling with blood and brain matter, and he was gurgling and oozing secretions from his mouth.

  He was BTH?

  Will shuddered at the thought of this poor son of a bitch living like this for at least another eighteen years, then grabbed Mark's briefcase and bolted out the door.

  AUGUST 1, 2009

  LOS ANGELES

  Will tried to be invisible. People were rushing past him, heading toward the bungalow. Two sprinting hotel security guards in blue blazers elbowed him off the path. He kept walking slowly, impassively, in the opposite direction through the hotel gardens, a man with a briefcase shaking inside his suit.

  As the doors to the main building closed behind him, he heard muffled shouts from the bungalow area. All hell was about to break loose. Sirens were approaching; response times are fast in ritzy zips, he thought. He needed to make a snap decision. He could try to make it to his car or stay put and hide in plain sight. The tactic had worked at the beauty salon so he decided to try it again, and besides, he was too unsteady to do much more.

  The front desk was in turmoil. Guests were reporting gunshots, security protocols were being enacted. He briskly strode past overwrought employees and angled toward the elevators, where he hopped on a waiting car and randomly pressed the third-floor button.

  The corridor was empty except for a service cart in front of a room halfway down the hall. He peeked into the partially open door of Room 315 and saw a housekeeper vacuuming.

  "Hello!" he called out as blithely as he could.

  The maid smiled at him, "Hello, sir. I'll be finishing soon." There were bags, a man's clothes in the closet.

  "I'm back early from a meeting," Will said. "I've got to make a call."

  "No problem, sir. Just call housekeeping when you like and I can come back."

  He was alone.

  Looking out the garden-facing window, he saw police and paramedics. He slumped on the side chair and closed his eyes. He didn't know how much time he had-he needed to think.

  Will was back on the fishing boat with his father, Phillip Weston Piper, who was silently baiting a line. He'd always thought it a grand-sounding name for a man with rough hands and sun-beaten skin who made his living arresting drunks and ticketing speeders. His grandfather had been a social studies teacher in a Pensacola junior high school with high hopes for his newborn son and thought a posh name would give him a leg up in the world. It was a nonfactor. His father grew up to be a fun-hunting carouser and booze hound who drank his way through life and was a miserable bully of a husband who subjected his mother to a constant fusillade of abuse.

  But he was a halfway decent father, taciturn to the extreme, though Will always sensed that he was making the effort to do the right thing for his son. Maybe their relationship would have been better if he'd known in advance that his father was going to die during his senior year at college. Maybe then he would have made the first move and engaged the man in a conversation to find out what he thought of his life, his family, his son. But that conversation was buried with Phillip Weston Piper, and now he had to go through life without it.

  Will never thought much about religion or philosophy. His business was, in effect, the death business, and his approach to the investigation of murders was fact-based. Some people lived, others died-wrong place, wrong time. There was a terrible randomness to it.

  His mother had been a church woman, and when he visited, he dutifully accompanied her to the First Baptist Church in Panama City. She was mourned there when cancer took her. He had heard his fill of will-of-God talk and divine plans. He'd read about Calvinism and predestination in school. All this was hokum, he always thought. Chaos and randomness ruled the world. There was no master plan.

  Apparently, he'd been wrong.

  He opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. The entire Beverly Hills police force was down in the garden. More EMTs and paramedics were arriving. He reached for the laptop and opened it. It was in sleep mode. When it resumed, the log-on window to Shackleton's database demanded a password. Will misspelled Pythagoras three times before getting it right. So much for his Harvard education.

  There was a search screen: enter name, enter DOB, enter DOD, enter city, enter zip code, enter street address. It was all very user-friendly. He typed his own name and his DOB, and the computer told him: BTH. Fine, he thought, confirmed. Hopefully not BTH the way Mark Shackleton was BTH, but he had at least eighteen years in him, a lifetime.

  The next entries wouldn't be so easy. He hesitated, considered shutting the computer down, but there were more sirens, more shouts from the garden. He inhaled sharply then typed, Laura Jean Piper, 7-8-1984, then hit the Enter key. BTH

  He exhaled, and silently mouthed, Thank God.

  Then he inhaled again and typed, Nancy Lipinski, White Plains, NY, and hit Enter. BTH

  One more to solidify his plan: Jim Zeckendorf, Weston, Massachusetts. BTH

  That's all I want to know, that's all I need to know, he thought. He was trembling.

  As he sat there, the logic seemed inescapable. He, his daughter, and Nancy were going to survive despite the operatives who were tasked to kill in order to keep Area 51 secret. That meant he was going to take an action that prevented their deaths.

  It was madness! Take free will and throw it out the window, he thought. He was being carried downstream by the River of Destiny. He was not the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.

  He was crying now, for the first time since the day his father died.

  While trauma teams were transporting the wounded from the bungalow to waiting ambulances, Will was at the desk in Room 315, composing a letter on hotel stationery. He finished and reread it. There was a blank he needed to fill in before dropping it in a mailbox.

  The beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills was marred by the noise and diesel stench of dozens of emergency service vehicles and news vans spewing fumes up and down Sunset Boulevard. He walked past them, head down, and hailed a taxi.

  "Hell's going on here?" the driver asked him.

  "Damned if I know," Will answered.

  "Where to?"

  "Take me to any kind of computer store, the L.A. public library, and a post office. In that order. This is extra." He reached over the seat and dropped a hundred dollars in the driver's lap.

  "You want it, mister, you got it," the cabbie said enthusiastically.

  At a Radio Shack, Will bought a memory stick. Back in the taxi, he quickly copied Mark's database onto the device and tucked it into his breast pocket.

  He had the taxi wait outside the Central Library, a white art deco palace near Pershing Square in downtown L.A. After a stop at the information desk, he headed deep into the bowels of the stacks. In the raw fluorescence of a sublevel, in a basement area that rarely saw foot traffic, he thought about crazy Donny and quietly thanked him for giving him the idea of a perfect hiding place.

  An entire case was devoted to the thick, musty, decades-old volumes of Los Angeles County municipal codes. When he was certain no one was about, he reached on tiptoes for the highest shelf and wriggled out the 1947 volume, a hefty book that slid heavily onto his outstretched palm.

  Nineteen forty-seven. A small touch of irony on a grim day. The book smelled old and unused, and unless something went terribly wrong, he w
as confident he would be the last person to handle it for a very long time. He opened it to the middle. The binding over the spine splayed an inch, forming the pocket he used to deeply insert the memory stick. When he closed the tome, the binding stretched and creaked, the sliver of hardware swallowed up, well-concealed.

  His next stop was a quick one, the nearest post office, where he purchased a stamp and dropped the completed letter into the first-class slot. It was addressed to Jim Zeckendorf at his Boston law firm. There was an envelope within an envelope. The cover letter began: Jim, I'm sorry to get you involved in something complicated but I need your help. If I don't personally contact you by the first Tuesday of every month for the foreseeable future, I want you to open the sealed envelope and follow the instructions.

  Back in the taxi, he told the driver, "Okay, last stop. Take me to Grauman's Chinese Theater."

  "You don't hit me as the tourist type," the driver said.

  "I like crowds."

  The Hollywood sidewalk was thick with tourists and hawkers. Will stood on the square of cement inscribed, TO SID, MANY HAPPY TRAILS, ROY ROGERS AND TRIGGER, complete with handprints, footprints, and horseshoe prints. He fished the phone out of his pocket and turned it on.

  She picked up quickly, as if she'd been holding the phone, waiting for it to ring.

  "Jesus, Will, are you okay?"

  "I've had a heck of a day, Nancy. How are you?"

  "Worried sick. Did you find him?"

  "Yeah, but I can't talk. We're being monitored."

  "Are you safe?"

  "I'm covered. I'll be fine."

  "What can I do?"

  "Wait for me, and tell me again that you love me."

  "I love you."

  He hung up and got a number from information. With tenacity, he jawboned his way up the line until he was one step away from speaking to his target. He cut through the officiousness of the staffer. "Yeah, this is Special Agent Will Piper of the FBI. Tell the Secretary of the Navy I'm on the line. Tell him I was with Mark Shackleton earlier today. Tell him I know all about Area 51. And tell him he has one minute to pick up the phone."