The Collectors cc-2

by David Baldacci

  “Understood.” He glanced at Trent. “Now, take that scum and get the hell out of here.”

  Albert Trent pulled away from Reuben’s grasp and marched over to the hooded men. As they started walking away, Trent turned back and grinned. “Adios!”

  Stone kept his eyes tight on Caleb’s face. He was also talking to his friend in a low voice, even as onlookers slowed and pointed at what must have seemed a very unusual scene, one man’s hand jammed under a collar on another man’s neck.

  “Deep breaths, Caleb. They’re not going to kill us. They’re not going to kill us. Deep breaths.” He checked his watch. Sixty seconds had passed since the men had left with Trent and disappeared into the crowd. “Two more minutes and we’re home free. We’re good, we’re in great shape.” He looked at his watch. “Ninety seconds. We’re almost there. Hang with me. Hang with me, Caleb.”

  Caleb was holding Stone’s arm in a death grip, his face flushed, his breath coming in mangled gasps, but he was standing firm and finally said, “I’m okay, Oliver.”

  Once, a suspicious Park Police officer started heading their way, but two men in white jumpsuits who’d been cleaning out trash cans intercepted the cop and sent him on his way. They’d already relayed the situation to the snipers, who’d stood down.

  Meantime, Milton and Annabelle had crept forward, and Reuben whispered to them what was going on. Tears fell down Milton’s horrified face while Annabelle put a trembling hand to her mouth and watched as the two men clung to each other.

  “Thirty seconds, Caleb, we’re almost there.” Stone’s gaze was now directly on the red light on the collar as he counted off the ticks. “Okay, ten seconds and we’re free.”

  Stone and Caleb together mouthed the final countdown. But the light didn’t turn to green. Caleb couldn’t see this and said, “Oliver, can you take it off now?”

  Even Stone’s nerves began to fail now, yet he never once thought of pulling his hand free. He closed his eyes for a second, awaiting the sting of the needle and the poison right behind it.

  “Oliver!” This was Annabelle calling out to him. “Look.”

  Stone opened his eyes and stared at the beautiful little drop of green in the bubble.

  “Reuben! Help me,” he called out.

  Reuben shot forward, and together they unlocked the collar and slipped it off Caleb’s neck. The librarian fell to his knees as the others crowded around him. When he finally looked up, he grabbed Stone’s hand.

  He gushed, “That was the bravest thing anyone’s ever done, Oliver. Thank you.”

  Stone looked around at the others, and then the truth hit home. It took him barely an instant to react. He shouted, “Get down!” He grabbed the collar and threw it over the hedge, and it landed in the large fountain.

  Two ticks later the collar exploded, sending geysers of water and chunks of concrete shooting into the air. The crowds on the Mall panicked and started running. When Stone and the others slowly got to their feet, Caleb said, “My God, Oliver, how did you know?”

  “It’s an old tactic, Caleb, to draw us all in and let down our guard. And he told me where the poisoned needles were in the collar because he knew the bomb would kill us, not the poison, if there ever was any poison in it.” Stone took the knapsack from Reuben and pulled from it a small flat object with a small screen on it. On the screen a blob of red was moving fast.

  “Now we finish this,” he said.

  CHAPTER 65

  “THEY’VE GONE INTO THE Smithsonian Metro entrance,” Reuben said, eyeing the small screen Stone was holding as the group raced across the Mall and pushed their way through the panicked crowds and small blocks of police.

  “That’s why we picked that exchange spot,” Stone answered.

  “But the Metro will be jammed,” Milton said. “How will we find them in there?”

  “We took a page from Trent and company. You know the chemical wash they put on the letters in the book to make them glow?”

  “Sure, so?” Milton said.

  Stone said, “I injected Trent with a chemical provided by Alex Ford that transmits a signal to this receiver. It’s like the man’s glowing for us. Using this, we can pick him out of a crowd of thousands. Alex and his men also have a receiver. We’re going to pin them down.”

  “I hope it works,” Caleb said as they forced their way through the swells of people. He rubbed his neck. “I want to see them rot in jail. And no books to read. Ever! That’ll serve them right.”

  Suddenly, screams poured out of the station below.

  “Come on!” Stone shouted, and they dashed down the escalator.

  While Trent and the two men were waiting for the next train, a pair of agents disguised as maintenance workers had approached from their rear. Before they had a chance to draw their weapons, both men fell forward with gaping bullet wounds in their backs. Behind them Roger Seagraves, wearing a cloak, replaced the silenced pistols in his twin belt holsters. The noise of the crowds had covered the suppressed shots, but when the men fell, and the people saw the blood, the screams started, and panicked citizens began running in all directions. An instant before one of the agents died, he rallied, pulled his gun and shot one of the hooded men in the head. As this man dropped, the detonator device he still carried in his hand clattered to the stone tile floor.

  A westbound train roared into the station and disgorged still more passengers, who ran headlong into the growing chaos.

  Trent and his remaining guard used this panic to jump onto one of this train’s cars. Seagraves did likewise, but with the riptide of the crowd he could only manage to scramble onto the next car down.

  Right before the doors closed, Stone and the others fought their way through the mass of people and clambered aboard. The train car was packed, but Stone checked his tracking device and saw that Trent was very close by. He scanned the interior and finally spotted him at the other end. Stone quickly noted that only one hooded man remained with him. The problem was that at any moment Trent or his bodyguard could spot them.

  A few moments later Alex Ford and several other agents ran through the crowd, but the train was already pulling out. He yelled at his men, and they ran back out of the station.

  Inside the moving train, Stone said, “Reuben, sit down, quick!” Reuben towered over everyone and thus was the one most likely to be spotted. Reuben pushed some teenage boys out of the way and sat on the floor. Stone ducked down and kept his gaze on Trent. He was talking to his bodyguard and holding his hands up to his ears for some reason. Facing the way he was, Stone couldn’t see Roger Seagraves in the car behind him, watching him through the glass. Seagraves had been stunned to see that Caleb and the others were still alive. He was lining up for a shot to Stone’s head when the train sped into the next station and lurched to a stop. People pushed and pulled to get on and off, and Seagraves was levered away from his kill position.

  The train took off again and gained speed rapidly. Stone was now making his way through the crowd toward Trent. He palmed his knife, keeping the blade tucked against his forearm under his sleeve. He visualized plunging the knife up to the hilt into Trent’s chest. Yet that wasn’t his plan. He would kill the guard, but Stone had no intention of cheating Trent out of spending the rest of his life in prison.

  Stone was closing in on his target when his plans were foiled. The train rocketed into Metro Center, came to a stop, and the doors burst open. Metro Center was the busiest station in the entire subway system. Trent and his guard jumped through the open door. In the next car down Seagraves did likewise. Stone and the others pushed their way out and into a crush of passengers rushing to and from trains arriving and departing on two different levels and from several different directions.

  Stone kept his gaze on Trent and the hooded figure next to him. From the corner of his eye he saw two men in white jumpsuits heading toward Trent. What he didn’t see was Roger Seagraves slide a small metal object out of his pocket, pull a pin with his teeth and let it fly, even as he turned his b
ack and made sure his ears were plugged.

  Stone saw the oblong cylinder sail past him through the air and knew instantly what it was. He whirled around and screamed to Reuben and the others, “Get down and cover your ears!” A couple seconds later the “flash-bang” went off, and dozens of people around it collapsed to the floor holding their ears, covering their eyes and screaming in pain.

  Trent and his bodyguard had been unaffected by the explosion. They’d put ear protectors on and had averted their gaze from the “flash” part of the flash-bang.

  Stone, woozy despite having put his face to the floor and jammed his coat sleeves into his ears, looked up and saw shoes and feet flying in front of him. As he tried to get up, a large man fleeing the panic barreled into him, knocking him down. Stone felt the tracker fly out of his hands, and he watched with a sickening feeling as it slid across the floor, over the edge and onto the tracks under the train as it pulled out of the station. When the end car cleared the station, he lunged to the edge and looked down. The box had been crushed.

  He turned back around and saw that Reuben had attacked the hooded man. Stone sprang to his friend’s aid, not that the big man needed it. Reuben put the smaller man in a half nelson, lifted him off the floor and slammed him headfirst into a metal pole. Then Reuben flung the man away, and he slid across the slick floor as people scrambled to get out of the way. As Reuben stormed toward him, Stone hit him from behind, knocking his friend down.

  “What the hell—” Reuben grunted as the shot fired by the man sailed by overhead. Stone had seen the gun and knocked Reuben out of the way just in time.

  The hooded man rose on one knee and prepared for a point-blank shot but was dropped by the impact of three rounds in his chest fired by two federal agents who came running up followed by uniformed police.

  Stone helped Reuben up and looked around for the others.

  Annabelle waved from a far corner, Milton and Caleb beside her.

  “Where’s Trent?” Stone called out.

  Annabelle shook her head and held her hands up in a helpless gesture.

  Stone stared hopelessly around the crowded platform. They’d lost him.

  Suddenly, Caleb screamed, “There, going up the escalator. That’s the man who kidnapped me. Foxworth!”

  “And Trent!” Milton added.

  They all looked upward. At the sound of his alias Seagraves glanced over his shoulder, and his hood fell away, giving them all a good look at him and Albert Trent, who was beside him.

  “Damn,” Seagraves muttered. He maneuvered Trent through the crowd, and they raced out of the train station.

  Up on the street Seagraves pushed Albert Trent into a cab and gave an address to the driver. He whispered to Trent, “I’ll meet you there later. I’ve got a private plane ready to take us out of the country. Here’re your travel papers and new ID pack. We’ll get your appearance altered.” He shoved a thick wad of documents and a passport into Trent’s hands.

  Seagraves started to slam the cab door shut and then abruptly stopped. “Albert, give me your watch.”

  “What?”

  Seagraves didn’t ask again. He ripped the watch off Trent’s wrist and closed the cab door. It drove off, a panicked Trent looking back at him through the window. Seagraves planned to kill Trent later, and he had to have something belonging to him. He was very angry about having to leave his collection behind, because he couldn’t risk returning to his house. And Seagraves was also upset because he hadn’t been able to get any items from the two agents he’d killed in the Metro.

  Well, I can always start a new collection.

  He ran across the street to an alleyway, climbed into a van he’d parked there and changed his clothes. Then he waited for his pursuers to appear. And this time he wouldn’t miss.

  CHAPTER 66

  STONE AND THE OTHERS RODE the escalator out of the Metro along with hundreds of other panicked people. While sirens filled the air and a small army of police converged on the area to investigate the rampage, they walked down the street aimlessly.

  “Thank goodness Caleb’s okay,” Milton said.

  “Absolutely,” Reuben bellowed. He grabbed Caleb around the shoulders. “What the hell would we do without you to tease?”

  “Caleb, how did you come to be abducted?” Stone asked curiously.

  Caleb quickly explained about the man calling himself William Foxworth. “He said he had books for me to look at, and then the next thing I know, I’m unconscious.”

  “Foxworth, that was the name he used?” Stone asked.

  “Yes, it was on his library card, so he would’ve had to show some ID to get it.”

  “Undoubtedly not his real name. At least we got a look at him.”

  “What do we do now?” Annabelle asked.

  “What I still don’t understand is how the chemical wash was put in the books,” Milton said. “Albert Trent works on the intelligence committee staff. He gets the secrets somehow and then passes them on to whom? And how do they end up in books at the reading room where Jewell English and presumably Norman Janklow see and write them down using their special glasses?”

  While they were all mulling those questions, Stone used his cell phone to check in with Alex Ford. They were still looking for Trent, but Ford advised Stone and the others to pull back from the chase. “No sense in putting yourselves in more danger,” he said. “You’ve done enough.”

  After Stone had told them that, Caleb said, “So where do we go? Home?”

  Stone shook his head. “The Library of Congress is near here. I want to go there.”

  Caleb wanted to know why.

  “Because that’s where this all started, and a library is always a good place to get answers.”

  Caleb was able to get them into the library but not the reading room because it was closed on Saturday. Wandering the halls, Stone said to the others, “What confuses me most of all is the timing of events.” He paused, marshaling his thoughts. “Jewell English came to the reading room two days ago, and the highlights were in the Beadle book. Later that night, when we had the book, the highlights vanished. That is a very tight time frame.”

  Caleb said, “It is amazing, really, because most books in the vault sit unread for years, even decades. The highlighting would have to go on the letters, and Jewell would have to be contacted to come in with the name of the book to ask for. Then, like you said, that very same day the highlights disappear.”

  Stone stopped walking and leaned against a marble banister. “Yet how could they be so sure the timing would work? You wouldn’t want the wash to remain on the pages very long in case the police got their hands on them. Indeed, if we’d acted a little sooner, we might have gotten the book to the FBI before the chemical evaporated. So logically, the highlighting had to have taken place close to the time English came in.”

  Caleb said, “I’d been in and out of the vaults before Jewell came in that day. I didn’t see anyone in there other than some of the staff, and none stayed longer than ten or fifteen minutes. That wouldn’t have been nearly long enough to highlight all those letters. And they couldn’t have done it anywhere else, because that would require them taking the book home.” He jerked. “Wait a minute. If any of the staff had taken it home, I can check that. They’d have to fill out the four-part call slip. Come on! The reading room’s closed, but I can check from another place.”

  He led them to the library’s main reference desk, talked to the woman there for a few moments and then stepped behind the counter, logged on the computer and started typing. A minute later he looked disappointed. “No Beadles have been checked out. In fact, no books at all have been checked out by library personnel in over four months.”

  While they all were standing there, Rachel Jeffries walked by. She was the conservator Caleb had brought the Beadle dime novel containing the highlights to for repair.

  She said, “Oh, hello, Caleb, I didn’t think you came in on weekends anymore.”

  “Hi, Rachel, just doing s
ome research.”

  “I’m trying to catch up on some backlog at conservation. I popped over here to meet with someone on a project I’m doing. Oh, while I have you, I wanted to let you know that the Beadle you gave me to work on had just recently been returned to the vault after repairs.”

  “What?” Caleb said, stunned.

  “It had some back cover damage and a few loose pages. When I looked up its conservation history, I was really surprised because, like I said, it had just been brought back to the vault. Any idea how it was damaged again?”

  “When exactly had it been brought back to the vault?” Caleb asked, ignoring her question.

  “Why, the day before you gave it to me.”

  “Rachel, hang on a minute.” Caleb started tapping on the computer keyboard again. He was looking for how many Beadles had been sent to conservation in the recent past. His answer came back quickly as the software churned through the data.

  “Thirty-six Beadles repaired over the last two years,” he said to the others. Next he checked the records for books Jewell English and Norman Janklow had requested, together with all books that had gone to the conservation department over the last six months. He found that Jewell English had requested 70 percent of the Beadles that had been repaired in the last six months. And she’d requested them on the exact day they had come back from conservation. He found a similar pattern for Norman Janklow.

  He told the others the results of his search. “The Beadles require a lot of preservation work because they were so cheaply made.”

  Stone, whose mind had raced ahead of the others, looked at Rachel Jeffries. “Can you tell us which conservator repaired that particular Beadle?”

  “Oh, sure, it was Monty Chambers.”

  Stone and the others started running down the long corridor.

  Caleb called back over his shoulder, “Rachel, I love you.”

  She immediately blushed but managed to say, “Caleb, you know I’m married. But maybe we can have a drink sometime.”