The Collectors cc-2

by David Baldacci

  Warren recounted the conversation and then added, “I told them you’d organized the toast for Bob and that you’d stayed behind at the committee.”

  “What did they look like?”

  Warren described Stone and Milton. “Do you know them?”

  “No, not at all. That is weird.”

  “Well, again, I just thought I’d give you a heads-up. Hope I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t have.”

  “I have no secrets,” Trent replied.

  “Hey, Albert, if anything opens on the committee staff, let me know, willya? I’m tired of twiddling my thumbs.”

  “Will do and thanks for the info.”

  Albert immediately left his office and made a call from a pay phone and arranged to meet with Seagraves outside the Capitol later.

  When Seagraves arrived, Trent said, “We’ve got a problem.”

  Seagraves listened and said, “Well, their next move is obvious.”

  “You’ll take care of it?”

  “I always take care of it.”

  CHAPTER 53

  WHILE MILTON AND STONE were making their investigative rounds, Caleb glanced up from his desk in the reading room as Annabelle walked in, wearing a black pleated skirt and matching jacket, white blouse and low pumps. She had a tote bag slung over her shoulder and was holding her newly minted library card with her picture on it. Caleb approached her.

  “Can I help you, Miss . . . ?”

  “Charlotte Abruzzio. Yes, I was looking for a certain book.”

  “Well, you came to the right place. After all, this is a library.” Caleb laughed.

  Annabelle didn’t even crack a smile. She’d told him to keep the conversation to a minimum and not to attempt any lame jokes, but he’d gone and done it anyway, the little dork. She gave him the name of the book she wanted. It was one he’d suggested the night before when they’d gone over the plan.

  Caleb retrieved the volume from the vault, and Annabelle sat down at a table with it. She was seated facing the door and also where she could easily see Caleb.

  An hour later Caleb jumped up. “Ah, Jewell, how are you? Jewell, it’s so good to see you,” he said, advancing quickly on the older lady after giving Annabelle a “that’s her” look.

  At her seat Annabelle gritted her teeth. What a piece of work. The man could not have been more obvious if he’d pulled out a pair of handcuffs and tackled the old woman. Luckily, Jewell English seemed not to have noticed because she was fumbling in her bag.

  A few minutes later Caleb gave Jewell a book from the vault, and she settled down with it. Caleb kept going back over to her often and then glancing at Annabelle as though she might have somehow missed the identity of the target. In exasperation Annabelle finally gave him such a fierce glare that he fled back to his desk.

  When Jewell was done an hour later, she packed her bag, said good-bye to Caleb and left. Annabelle followed her a minute later and caught up with her out on the street where the elderly woman was looking for a cab. Annabelle had wrapped a scarf around her head and put on a long jacket she’d carried in her bag. As a cab pulled up to the curb, Annabelle made her move. She bumped into Jewell, jostling the woman’s bag. Her hand slipped in and out of it so fast, a person standing right next to them would’ve been unable to follow the move.

  “Oh, my Gawd,” Annabelle said in a deep southern voice. “Honey, I am sooo sorry. My mama didn’t raise me to run into nice ladies like you.”

  “That’s all right, dear,” Jewell said, a little out of breath from the collision.

  “Y’all have a nice day,” Annabelle said.

  “You too,” Jewell said pleasantly as she climbed into the cab.

  Annabelle fingered the flowered glass case in her pocket as she walked slowly away. A few minutes later she was back in the reading room. There was a different person working the front desk. Caleb hurried over to Annabelle. “Dawn,” he said to the woman at the front desk, “I’m going to give Ms. Abruzzio a quick tour of the vault. She’s in from out of town. I, uh, already cleared it with the higher-ups,” he lied. This sort of flouting of the rules would have been unthinkable a short time ago, but with all that had happened, Caleb considered finding Jonathan’s killer more important than following library rules.

  “All right, Caleb,” Dawn said.

  The pair went inside the vault, and Caleb led Annabelle to the Jefferson Room, where they could talk in private. She held up the glasses. “Want to try them on? I did and couldn’t see much.”

  Caleb did so and then immediately pulled them off. “My God, that’s weird; it’s like looking through three or four layers of different glass, with little sunspots. I don’t understand. I could see through her other pair perfectly.”

  “Which is why she gave you those glasses and not these. Otherwise, you would’ve been suspicious. Do you have the book she was looking at?”

  He held up the Beadle. “I just pretended to reshelve it.”

  Annabelle took the book. “Looks pretty cheap.”

  “That’s the whole point. They’re dime novels from the nineteenth century.”

  “The thing is she looked like she was reading this book okay with these glasses. I mean, she was taking notes.”

  “Yes, she was, wasn’t she?” Caleb slowly put the glasses on and, squinting, opened the book.

  “Can you read anything?” Annabelle asked.

  “It’s a bit blurry.” As he turned the pages, he suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute, what’s that?”

  “What’s what?” she said.

  He pointed to a word on the page. “This letter is highlighted. Don’t you see, it’s glowing yellow, bright as day.”

  Annabelle looked at where he was pointing. “I don’t see anything like that.”

  “Right there!” he exclaimed, putting his finger on a letter e in a word on the first line.

  “It’s not glowing to me, and—” She broke off. “Caleb, give me the glasses.” Annabelle slipped them on and looked at the page. The letter was now a vibrant yellow, literally jumping off the page. She slowly took the specs off. “These are really special glasses.”

  Caleb was staring at the page with his naked eye. No glow. He put the glasses back on, and the letter e glowed. “And there’s a highlighted w and an h and an f.” He flipped to the next page. “And there’s another w and an s and a p. And a lot more letters. All highlighted.” He took off the glasses. “E, w, h, f, w, s, p. That’s gibberish.”

  “No, it’s a code, Caleb,” Annabelle said. “These letters form a secret code, and you need these special glasses to see them.”

  He looked astonished. “A secret code?”

  “Do you know what other books she’s looked at recently?”

  “They’re all Beadles, but I can check the call slips.”

  A few minutes later he’d rounded up six books. He went through them page by page wearing the glasses, but there were no glowing letters. “I don’t understand. Was it just the one book?”

  “It can’t be,” Annabelle replied in frustration. She held up the book with the glowing letters. “Can I check it out?”

  “No, this is not a lending library.”

  “Not even you?”

  “Well, yes, I can. But I’d have to fill out a four-part call slip.”

  “So someone at the library could know you’ve checked it out?”

  “Well, yes, they could.”

  “That’s no good. We could inadvertently tip someone off.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Caleb, someone here had to highlight those letters. If you take home one of the books involved, it could alert people who are behind whatever the scheme is.”

  “Are you saying that someone at the Library of Congress is involved in putting secret codes in rare books?”

  “Yes!” she said in exasperation. “Give me the book. I’ll get it out of the building. It’s small and thin, it won’t be a problem. Wait a minute, do the books have electronic antitheft devices built i
nto them?”

  He looked appalled by the suggestion. “My God, woman, these are rare books; that would be tantamount to desecrating them.”

  “Yeah? Well, it seems that someone already did that by making the letters glow. So I’ll just borrow the book for a while.”

  “Borrow it! That book is the property of the Library of Congress!”

  “Caleb, don’t make me hit you. I’m taking the book.” He started to protest again but she cut him off. “This might have something to do with Jonathan’s death,” she said. “And if it does, I don’t care what the rules are here, I want the truth about how he died. You were his friend. Don’t you want to know too?”

  Caleb quickly calmed and said, “Yes, I do. But getting the book out of here won’t be easy. Technically, we have to check every bag before anyone leaves the room. I can pretend to search yours, of course, but the guards also look into every bag before it leaves the building, and they’re very thorough.”

  “Like I said, it won’t be a problem. I’m taking this to Oliver’s place tonight. Meet me there after you get off work. He strikes me as someone who could be able to understand all this.”

  “What do you mean? Granted, it seems that he has certain skills and knowledge that are somewhat out of the ordinary, but secret codes? That’s spy stuff.”

  “You know, for a man who spends all his time around books, you are the most clueless person I’ve ever met!” she said.

  “That is a highly offensive and rude remark,” he said, bristling.

  “Good, it was supposed to be!” she snapped. “Now get me some tape.”

  “Tape, what for?”

  “Just go get it.”

  He reluctantly retrieved the tape from a storage cabinet inside the main vault area.

  “Now turn around,” she said.

  “What?”

  She spun him around. While his back was turned, Annabelle hiked her skirt up to her waist, positioned the paperback book around the inside of her left thigh and secured it there with the tape. “That’ll hold it, although it’s not going to be fun getting it off.”

  “Please tell me you are not doing anything to damage that book,” he said sternly. “It is a vital piece of history.”

  “Turn around and see for yourself.”

  He whipped around, saw the book, and also her exposed pale thighs and a thin line of her panties, and gasped.

  She said in a breathy voice, “I think the book will be very happy there, Caleb, don’t you?”

  “Never in all my years as a librarian at this venerable institution,” he began, his voice quavering with shock; however, Caleb didn’t once take his eyes off her legs even as his heart thundered in his chest.

  She slowly pulled her skirt back down, smiling impishly. “And you loved every second of it.” She bumped him with her hip as she passed by. “I’ll see you at Oliver’s, stud!”

  CHAPTER 54

  AFTER ANNABELLE’S MEMOrable display, Caleb had recovered enough to where he could at least pretend to work. That was interrupted a bit later when Kevin Philips entered the reading room and came over to his desk.

  “Caleb, can you step outside?” he said quietly.

  Caleb rose. “Sure, Kevin, what’s up?”

  Philips looked very concerned and said in a low voice, “The police are outside. They want to talk to you.”

  Caleb instantly felt all of his organs shutting down even as his mind raced madly through the possible doomsday reasons why the cops were here for him. Had the damn woman been caught with the book taped next to her crotch and spilled her guts naming him as an accomplice? Had Jewell English discovered what had happened and reported the theft of her glasses to the authorities, with all arrows pointing to him? Was he, Caleb Shaw, going to fry in the electric chair?

  “Uh, Caleb, can you please get up and come with me?” Philips said.

  Caleb looked up at him and realized that he had missed his chair and collapsed to the floor instead. He scrambled to his feet, white-faced, and said with as much surprise as he could muster, “I wonder what they could possibly want with me, Kevin?” Dear God, let it be a minimum-security prison.

  Outside, Philips handed him off to the police, represented by two detectives in baggy suits and sporting inscrutable features, and then fled even as Caleb stared pitifully after him. The two men escorted Caleb to an empty office. The going was slow as Caleb was having trouble making his legs work in synchronization. And any attempt at speech was rendered impossible by the absence of even the slightest trace of saliva in his mouth. Did they still have libraries in prison? Would he have to be somebody’s bitch?

  The bigger of the two men parked his butt on a desk while Caleb stood rigid against the wall awaiting the Miranda warning, the cold feel of the cuffs, the end of his respectable life. From librarian to felon, the fall had been astonishingly swift. The other man fished his hand in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “These are to DeHaven’s home, Mr. Shaw.” Caleb held out a shaky hand and took them. “They were taken from your friend Reuben Rhodes.”

  Caleb blurted out, “I wouldn’t call him a friend, more of a casual acquaintance.”

  The two detectives exchanged glances. The big man said, “Anyway, we also wanted to let you know that he’s been released on his own recognizance.”

  “Does that mean you no longer consider him a suspect?”

  “No. But we checked out his story and yours. For now we’ll leave it at that.”

  Caleb stared at the keys. “Can I go to the house, or is it off-limits?”

  “We’ve completed our evidentiary search at DeHaven’s residence, so you’re free to go in. But, uh, just in case, stay out of the attic.”

  “I wanted to check on the book collection. I’m his literary executor.”

  “The lawyers told us as much.”

  Caleb looked around. “So I’m free to go?”

  “Unless you have something more to tell us?” the big man said questioningly.

  Caleb stared between them. “Uh, good luck with your investigation?”

  “Right.” He eased off the desk, and the two detectives walked past Caleb, closing the door behind them.

  Caleb stood there for a bit, light-headed and unable to believe his infinite good fortune. Then he looked puzzled. Why would they just let Reuben go? And why would they just give him the keys to Jonathan’s house? Was this a setup? Were they right now waiting outside the office to jump him, perhaps claiming he’d stolen the keys or was trying to escape? Caleb knew these scandalous things happened; he watched cable TV.

  He ever so slowly nudged the door open and peered out. The hallway was clear. The library looked normal. He saw no indication at all of a SWAT team lurking. Caleb waited another couple of minutes, but nothing happened. Unable to figure it out, he realized there was one thing he could no longer put off. He left early and drove as fast as he could to DeHaven’s house. Inside the vault, he made straight for the small safe behind the picture. He needed to see if the library’s mark was in the book. He punched in the code and swung the door open. Then his organs started shutting down again.

  The Bay Psalm Book wasn’t there.

  When they congregated at Stone’s place that night, they were joined by the newly freed Reuben. After they had all congratulated their friend, Stone wrote on a piece of paper that “I’d rather not discuss things here.” Then he jotted down a series of instructions while the others kept up a chatter of dialogue.

  Thirty minutes later Milton and Caleb left the cottage. Twenty minutes after that, Reuben and Annabelle took their leave. An hour after dark the lights in Stone’s cottage went out, and thirty minutes after that, Stone was sliding on his belly through the high grass in the cemetery. He exited through a gap in the wrought-iron fencing where it dipped down into a hollow behind a large tombstone.

  After a series of doglegs through some old sections of Georgetown, Stone reconvened with the others in an alley. He unlocked a wooden door that was revealed behind a Dumpster and
motioned them all through. He locked the door behind them and turned on a small overhead light. There were no windows in the place, so the light didn’t matter. There were some rickety chairs and wooden crates, and the group collectively sat. Annabelle looked around the dank, dirty interior and joked, “You sure know how to show a lady a good time. Is this place available for parties?”

  “Let’s hear your report,” Stone said.

  She took a few minutes to fill everyone in on her and Caleb’s discovery. She passed the glasses and book over to Stone while Caleb remained uncharacteristically silent. Stone looked through the glasses and the book. “You’re right. It does look like a code.”

  Annabelle said, “Who’d be putting codes in library books?”

  Stone put the book and glasses down. Milton picked up the glasses, put them on and started reading through the book.

  Reuben stroked his chin. “Does it tie into Behan’s murder? He dealt in the defense and intelligence industry. God knows there are spies all over those sectors.”

  Stone nodded. “That would be a good guess, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that.” He explained what he and Milton had found out at the Federalist Club and from their talk with Dennis Warren.

  “So this Albert Trent stuck at the intelligence committee,” Annabelle said. “What does that mean?”

  Reuben spoke up. “It means he’d have access to secrets worth selling, I can tell you that. When I worked at DIA, we had briefings all the time with the Hill. The intelligence committee members and their staff all had to have top-secret clearances.”

  “But spies are notorious for not telling Congress everything,” Milton said, looking up from the book. “Would Trent really know enough of value that he could sell?”

  “Remember,” Stone said, “Trent was not always a staffer there. He’d once been at the CIA.”

  “So he could have contacts there. Hell, maybe there, NSA, NIC, the whole alphabet,” Reuben commented. “He might have assembled a minimart for espionage.”

  “But how do you get from a mole like Trent to secret codes in rare books?” Annabelle asked as she shifted her weight on the old chair she was sitting on and rubbed her tender thigh where she’d had to tear the tape off to get the book free.