by Brad Meltzer
Perfect.
He knows how this will end. He’ll do his killing in the warehouse, in Benedict Arnold’s old home. A nice message. He’ll snap Ingrid’s neck first. Anything else would be foolish.
The Bear leaves the car. He finds a better hiding spot. Closer to the warehouse.
Then he waits.
81
Washington, DC
Rabbit was still staring at the airline files.
So many flights: Nixon traveling to see Kennedy, Kennedy traveling to see Nixon.
“You think Hazel’s dad was at those meetings too?” Butchie asks through the phone.
“The later ones. And clearly the final one,” Rabbit said. “If I’m right—if this was a big enough secret to Jack—they must’ve known Jack would go anywhere to keep it quiet.” What struck Rabbit also, however, wasn’t just the locations. It was the information itself.
Flights like this, this was all information his boss Moten should have had access to with the click of a mouse. Which meant Moten had chosen not to include all of Kennedy’s flight records when he gave Rabbit the file.
The police car came back around the block, lights on, hit the siren for just a blip, and pulled even with Rabbit’s car. The passenger window rolled down, and the officer motioned for Rabbit to roll down his window too.
“Something I can help you with?” Rabbit asked.
“You can’t park here,” the officer said, turning down his radio, which was playing Elliot in the Morning.
Rabbit held up his government ID. “I’m on business, officer,” he said.
The police car rolled away.
“I need to get out of this spot,” Rabbit said, mostly to himself.
“No fun getting sweated by the man, is it?” Butchie asked. “Starts making you paranoid after a while. Then one day you find out, government was following you. Then that really messes you up, know what I mean?”
“Just listen. There’s something else,” Rabbit said. “I’m going to the airport. To Connecticut. But you need to tell Hazel: When I first got on this case, they said that the bibles found inside both Nixon and Kennedy, that the pages inside had Benedict Arnold’s handwriting on them, meaning they were from his book.”
“Okay,” Butchie said.
“But I never saw them.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I saw reports. But not the actual physical evidence. Or even photos. It was all happening at light speed.” He was talking to himself now, trying to make sense of this. “Moten never showed me the real thing. But why wouldn’t Moten show it to me unless…”
“Man,” Butchie said, “everything I know I learned from watching Ice-T on Law & Order. So if you’re expecting me to grasp something here, I’m not exactly grasping it.”
“Maybe the reason no one has ever found Benedict Arnold’s bible is that it’s not actually missing.”
“Then what were Nixon, Kennedy, and Hazel’s dad looking for?”
“The most valuable thing of all. Each other.”
82
Sirte, Libya
1983
Jack and Skip are led out of the palace, across a vast lawn with precise geometric hedges, and into a guesthouse.
Unlike the palace with its massive chandeliers and ornate decor, the house is filled with normal furniture: a leather sofa in the living room, with books and magazines spread out over an ottoman and coffee table. From a back room, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” is bleating out. Jack realizes that this house is almost entirely Westernized, right down to the Lego he steps over as they’re led down a long hallway, toward the music.
A child lives here.
There’s a woman standing at the end of the hall, outside a closed door. She has long brown hair, a razor-sharp nose, and as they get closer, Jack sees that her cheeks are tracked with tears.
She also has a surgical mask dangling around her neck and blue surgical gloves on her hands.
How had Jack gotten here?
Two hundred years ago, when Benedict Arnold was finally revealed as a traitor, he jumped on his horse, went on the run, and left his wife and son behind. Jack couldn’t imagine it. Between love and war, you choose love. Always.
Over the next few days, letters were exchanged. Arnold asked for his family to be returned. George Washington agreed, but a deal would have to be made before Arnold could get his “bibles” back.
Of course, there would be a great cost. There was always a rub.
Soon after, a deal was struck, written and preserved in the endpapers of Arnold’s old bible. For the rest of the war, Arnold would be true to the British. That never changed. But from there on in, he owed Washington a debt—a debt that would be paid with information.
For a spymaster like Washington, it was an intelligence coup. In the months that followed, Benedict Arnold, to pay back his debt, sent coded information to Washington about impending British attacks—nothing that would turn the tide of war, but information that was used to save hundreds, perhaps thousands of American lives. Was there any other way to explain how a poorly trained group of farmers and fishermen took on the greatest fighting force in the world?
Today, Jack was proof of this. You don’t win at war by having the biggest gun, the largest army, or the best missiles. You win by owning the best people. And the ones with the best access.
Naturally, the military could never reveal they’d made a deal with America’s greatest enemy. But the benefit was unarguable. It was a detail that would go unmentioned—until World War II, when it was unearthed by a military researcher in the Signal Corps who found Arnold’s old books. An actual secret revealed. Sure, the tactics of the operation were changed—everything changes over time—but the idea was back in place. A new unit was formed, always at the ready, looking for opportunities, which they code-named Benedict Arnold’s bibles.
As Washington himself had proven, when you can find an enemy who’s desperate, it isn’t just an advantage for the United States. It’s an opportunity. And no opportunity is greater than a parent trying to save his sick child.
“I understand you are a man who can help us?” Tariq says, handing gloves and a mask to Jack.
“I am,” Jack says.
Tariq opens the door. Jack immediately smells bleach and ammonia, hears the woosh-woosh of an overhead fan.
Jack snaps on the gloves and affixes the mask, then turns to Skip. “I want you to wait right here with this nice man,” he says, and meets the eyes of the security guard, a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mass of a man, bald, with a knife and pistol holstered on his hip, “…and this nice woman.” With that, the crying woman looks up, as if she’s surprised she’s been noticed.
“What is your name?” she asks Skip in heavily accented English. She sniffles once, then wipes her eyes, composing herself.
“Skip,” he says. Then, “Nicholas.”
“I am Mona.” She forces out a smile. “You are a nice boy?”
“I am,” Skip says.
“My boy is nice too.” She turns to Jack. “You are a doctor?”
I’m a witch doctor, Jack thinks. I live inside of a magic box. I find ghosts.
“I’m here to help,” Jack says, telling himself that by being here, by helping this boy, he’ll be saving American lives. The thing is, he has no idea what’s waiting for him in that room.
He kneels down in front of Skip. “Be really good. Understand?” He points over his shoulder. “I’ll be right in there. Five minutes.”
He kisses Skip on top of his head, then whispers in his ear, “You get scared, scream. Don’t stop until you see my face. It’s for the camera. You understand? We’re playing a game for the camera.”
“We’re on the show?” Skip asks.
“That’s right,” Jack says. “Everything you see is make-believe.”
83
New Haven, Connecticut
Today
Ingrid, what happened in that room in Libya?” Hazel asked.
“Does
it matter?”
“Of course it matters. What my father did there—” Hazel cut herself off, made a sharp left, steered the car toward the warehouse on Water Street. “You said this unit, whatever it was called, for decades now, they sought out people with sick kids.”
“Our goal was to help those children.”
“There was a child in that room, wasn’t there? Did my father kill a child?”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Ingrid said. “What matters is someone found out about it.”
“What’s that supposed t—?”
Hazel’s phone started ringing. She saw the number. Butchie. He’d only call if it was time to pull the emergency parachute.
Hazel picked up the phone, didn’t say a word.
“Do you trust Agent Rabkin?” Butchie asked, voice galloping.
“What happened?”
“He called me. He found them. Nixon and Kennedy. He said they knew each other, like they were working together or some shit.”
“Working for what?”
“You tell me. He said Kennedy spent years looking for others like himself, looking for each other, for something that happened to them. And then they found it. Something bad that happened with your dad in Libya.”
Hazel turned toward Ingrid. She was unreadable as ever but could clearly hear Butchie through the phone.
“They found out what your father did,” Ingrid said, still staring straight ahead. “Then they blackmailed him.”
“Who you with, girl? The crazy lady?” Butchie asked.
On their right, across from a vacant brick building, was a warehouse, low and gray. According to Hazel’s research, though it didn’t look like it now, this was the place to be in the 1770s.
“This the property that was Kennedy’s?” Ingrid asked.
Hazel nodded. “It’s also where Benedict Arnold lived.”
“This warehouse?”
“They tore his house down 150 years ago. The question is: Do people know that’s the site of his old house? Would Arthur Kennedy know?”
Ingrid lit up her hand-rolled cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a plume of smoke. “You’d need to care. You’d need to want to own it.”
She was right. Based on what Butchie was saying, and what Hazel had proof of right here, Arthur Kennedy had a great many wants, most important of those being: finding his own past, finding Darren Nixon, and finding out if they were both “pages” in Benedict Arnold’s bible.
“You can’t park there,” a voice shouted. On their left, a security guard approached from a beat-up security shed in the warehouse parking lot. He had a nametag pinned to his chest. It read Leon, from a company called SecureFront. A rental. The kind of guy who reported, but didn’t stop.
“Butchie, let me call you back,” Hazel said, hanging up the phone.
“No parking, no loitering,” the guard added.
“Sorry about that,” Ingrid said, leaning across the car toward Leon. “We have an appointment. Should be on your list. Ingrid and Hazel.”
Hazel shot her a look. List?
The guard went back to his shed.
“It’ll stall him,” Ingrid said, reminding Hazel that Ingrid was a professional liar. “He won’t care. We’ll get in.”
“Forget getting in. Tell me what happened in Libya…in that room at the palace…You think that’s what Arthur Kennedy found out about?”
“Your father saw the best in people. That was his mistake,” Ingrid said. “He wanted to believe that he was changing the world, but he was just uncovering the darkness, including his own. Based on what your friend said, someone else might’ve uncovered your father’s darkness too.”
“So Kennedy found Nixon, and what? They took the Libya story to my dad and threatened to go public?”
Ingrid coughed, a deep rattle in her chest. Cancer, maybe. Emphysema? On its way. “Y’know, when Mark Twain finally died, people everywhere thought he’d faked it, because of how many times they claimed he was already dead,” Ingrid said. “That’s what I thought when I heard about your father. Seems like any minute now, he’s just going to pop up somewhere strange and announce it’s all been a ruse. Abducted by the agents of the Bilderbergs or something.”
“He’s gone,” Hazel said.
“I know. But it doesn’t hurt anybody if I pretend, does it?”
Hazel checked again in the rearview, had that feeling she was still being watched. No one was there. “You think that’s why Nixon was killed? That my father murdered him—or hired someone to murder him—because he and Kennedy were blackmailing my dad?”
Ingrid took a final deep drag of her cigarette, threw the nub of it out the window, shrugged. “That’s what I would do.”
“Ma’am, I don’t see you on the list,” Security Leon called back, reapproaching the car.
There was a hum in the air, like a river; Water Street backed up to a giant retaining wall that was supposed to block the rush of traffic from nearby I-95.
Two hundred years ago, this was the waterfront, where the aristocracy lived in big Colonial mansions. From this exact spot, you could see all of New Haven Harbor, lined with chestnut trees and bayberry shrubs, all green and yellow.
Today, the street was rutted and pockmarked, weeds growing amid clumps of trash.
“It’s okay,” Hazel said. “We’re just looking at the land. For Mr. Kennedy’s estate.”
Leon raised a hand up to his mouth in surprise. Another shared evolutionary tell, humans stifling surprise the same way at a warehouse in New Haven as a cave in Rawalpindi.
“Oh, no,” Hazel said, “you hadn’t heard the news?”
“No,” Leon said with real concern in his voice. “Something wrong with Mr. Kennedy? He sick or something?”
“He’s met his transition,” Ingrid said.
“Oh, that’s so sad,” Leon said. “You family or friends or lawyers or something?”
“Cousins,” Ingrid added, “down from Hartford.”
“Where’d it happen?”
“Dubai,” Hazel said. “Heart attack.”
Leon covered his mouth again, shook his head. “Poor guy. He was such a nice man.” He took another look at Hazel. “Do we know each other?”
“No,” Hazel said. She stared directly into his eyes. Not hiding at all. She let him see her, completely. It was all she could do not to reveal her teeth.
“You look so familiar to me,” he said.
“People tell me I have that kind of face.”
“I been working for Mr. Kennedy for coming on five years now. Never met any of his family before. Now I get to meet three of his cousins in the last few weeks.”
“Our family is very spread out,” Ingrid said, jumping in. “Who was it that you met? Amy from Virginia? Short brown hair?”
Leon leaned forward, like he was about to tell a secret. “It was a month ago. You know, the one from the TV. The famous one. Mr. Conspiracy. Surprised the hell out of me when he showed up.”
Hazel felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She knew she was about to see the monster under the bed all right, and it was going to be a monster she recognized. For her dad to be here, to be meeting with Kennedy and Nixon—here was the final proof that her father was being blackmailed and eventually took revenge.
“You met my father, Jack Nash?” she asked.
“No,” Leon said. “The other one.”
Other one?
“The younger one. Used to call him Scrappy-Doo,” the guard said. “What’s his name? Skipper?”
Hazel shook her head, her throat collapsing. All this time, she thought they were blackmailing her father. But what Kennedy and Nixon found…It wasn’t a dark secret about her dad. It was a secret about—
“Skip,” Hazel said.
“That’s him! That’s who was here. Skip.”
84
Sirte, Libya
1983
Tariq and Jack step into the back bedroom.
There’s a boy, maybe four years old,
with a tube in his nose, IVs pumping into both arms. He is covered in giant open sores, his face almost unrecognizable as a face, his scalp bare, divots in his skin so deep Jack worries he’ll see bone. The skin on the boy’s legs and arms is cratered, and a yellow fluid leaks out of the sores, staining the gauze taped around his joints.
Jack can’t tell if he’s been burned or shot or something worse, though Jack can’t imagine what could be worse.
“What happened?” Jack asks.
“Viral infection of some kind,” Tariq says. “His sister is already lost.”
Jack nods, tries to work out the logistics. Tariq has had a few wives. None of them is the woman crying outside. But this child is clearly his.
“Your government says he can be helped at the CDC. They can start treatment for whatever is devouring him.”
“We’ll do our best,” Jack says, well aware of the rub. To save his son, Tariq gets access to the best medicine in the world. In return, the next time Gaddafi plans to hijack an American plane or bomb another of our buildings, we’ll have a heads-up, save hundreds of lives. Maybe even thousands. With the right information, we could maybe even stop a war. Just like Washington did with Benedict Arnold. Just like Jack tried to do with every other young “page” in Arnold’s bible in all those other countries.
Everybody wins.
But all Jack is thinking right now is that he needs to get Skip away from this building, away from this country, immediately. Everyone nearby should be wearing hazmat suits. What if it’s airborne? These masks won’t do anything. Except, of course, no one in the room right now is sick. It’s not airborne.
“We need to get him out of here,” Jack says. “Bring me Ingrid.”
“I do not like her,” Tariq says.
“I don’t care if you like her.”
“She’s waiting in the helicopter for you. I entrust my boy to you and you alone, Jack Nash.”
The boy’s eyes blink open, and Jack can see him attempting to focus. His sclera are yellow, his pupils tiny dots of black. Whatever is wrong with this boy, it’s killing him, quickly. Jack hears the whoop-whoop-whoop of a helicopter outside.