by Steve Berry
“We were ordered away,” the man said.
“I’m your boss. Who contradicts me?”
“Your boss.”
Amazing. “Which one?”
“The attorney general. Brent Green himself came and told us to leave.”
Malone tossed the satchel from George Haddad’s apartment onto the bed. He and Pam were inside a hotel not far from Hyde Park, a familiar place he’d chosen for its congestion because, as he was taught, Nowhere better to hide in than a crowd. He also liked the pharmacy next door. There he’d purchased gauze, antiseptic, and bandages.
“I have to work on that shoulder,” he said.
“What do you mean? Let’s find a hospital.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
He sat on the bed beside her.
“It’s going to be that simple. I want a doctor.”
“If you’d stayed upstairs like I told you, nothing would have happened.”
“I thought you needed help. You were going to kill that man.”
“Don’t you get it, Pam? Wasn’t watching George die enough? These SOBs are serious. They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”
“I came to help,” she quietly said.
And he saw something in her eyes he hadn’t seen for years. Sincerity. Which raised a whole lot of questions he didn’t want to ask. Nor, he was sure, would she want to answer. “Doctors would involve police, which is a problem.” He sucked a few deep breaths. He was worn by fatigue and worry. “Pam, there are a lot of players here. The Israelis didn’t take Gary—”
“How do you know that?”
“Call it instinct. My gut tells me they didn’t do it.”
“They sure killed that old man.”
“Which was why I hid him away in the first place.”
“He called them, Cotton. You heard him. He called knowing they’d come.”
“He was doing his penance. Killing comes with consequences. George faced his today.” And the thought of his dead friend brought with it a renewed pang of regret. “I need to work on that wound.”
He slipped the shawl from around her shoulders and noticed that the towel was sticky with blood. “Did it open back up?”
She nodded. “On the way here.”
He peeled the compress away. “Whatever’s happening is complicated. George died for a reason—”
“His body was gone, Cotton. Along with the woman’s.”
“The Israelis apparently cleaned up their mess fast.” He carefully examined her arm and saw that the cut was indeed shallow. “Which only goes to prove what I’m saying. There are multiple players. At least two, maybe three, possibly four. Israel is not in the habit of killing American agents. But the people who murdered Lee Durant don’t seem to care. It’s almost like they’re inviting trouble. And that, the Israelis never do.”
He stood and entered the bathroom. When he returned he popped open a bottle of antiseptic and handed her a fresh towel. “Bite on this.”
A puzzled look came to her face. “Why?”
“I need to disinfect that wound and I don’t want anyone to hear you scream.”
Her eyes went wide. “That stuff hurts?”
“More than you can imagine.”
Stephanie switched off the cell phone. Brent Green himself came and told us to leave. Shock stiffened her spine, but decades in the intelligence business allowed nothing in her countenance to betray her surprise.
She faced Cassiopeia across the cab’s rear seat. “I’m afraid, at the moment, you’re the only person I can trust.”
“You seem disappointed.”
“I don’t know you.”
“That’s not true. In France you checked me out.”
Cassiopeia was right—she’d been thoroughly vetted, and Stephanie learned that the dark-skinned beauty had been born in Barcelona thirty-seven years ago. Half Muslim, though not noted as devout, Cassiopeia possessed master’s degrees in engineering and medieval history. She was the sole shareholder and owner of a multicontinent conglomerate based in Paris and involved in a broad spectrum of international business ventures with assets in the multibillion-dollar range. Her Moorish father had started the company and she’d inherited control, though she was little involved with its everyday operation. She also served as the chairwoman for a Dutch foundation that worked closely with the United Nations on international AIDS relief and world famine, particularly in Africa. Stephanie knew from personal experience that Vitt shied away from little, and she could wield a rifle with the accuracy of a sniper. At times a bit too brassy for her own good, Cassiopeia had been associated with Stephanie’s late husband and understood more about Stephanie’s personal life than she cared for anyone to know. But she trusted the woman. No question. Thorvaldsen had chosen wisely when he sent her.
“I have a serious problem.”
“That much we already know.”
“And Cotton is in trouble. It’s imperative I contact him.”
“Henrik hasn’t heard from him. Malone said he’d call when he’s ready, and you know him better than anyone.”
“How’s Gary?”
“Just like his father. Tough. He’s safe with Henrik.”
“Where’s Pam?”
“On her way back to Georgia. She flew with Malone to London and was leaving from there.”
“The Israelis are in London, too. Assassination squad.”
“Cotton’s a big boy. He can handle it. We have to decide what to do about your problem.”
Stephanie, too, had been thinking about that conundrum. Brent Green himself came and told us to leave. Which might explain why the Capitol Police had been scarce. Usually they were everywhere. She glanced out the taxi and saw that they were near Dupont Circle and her hotel. “We need to make sure we’re not being followed.”
“The Metro might be a better way to go.”
She agreed.
“Where are we headed?” Cassiopeia asked.
She spied the air pistol stuffed beneath Cassiopeia’s jacket. “You have any more darts that rock people to sleep?”
“Plenty.”
“Then I know exactly where we need to go.”
TWENTY-NINE
LONDON
7:30 PM
Malone watched Pam sleep. He was slouched in a chair beside the hotel room’s window, George Haddad’s satchel lying in his lap. He’d been right about the disinfectant: Pam had bitten hard on the towel as he’d doused the wound. Tears had welled in her eyes, but she’d been tough. Not a sound betrayed her agony. Feeling bad for her, he’d bought her a new shirt from the lobby boutique.
He was tired, too, but his “Billet nerves,” as he called them, supplied his muscles with boundless energy. He could recall times when days had passed without eating, his body charged with adrenaline, his focus on staying alive and getting the job done. He’d thought that rush a thing of the past. Something he’d never experience again.
And here he was.
Right in the middle.
The past few hours could have been a gruesome nightmare except that, in undreamlike fashion, the events played clear in his mind. His friend George Haddad had been shot right before his eyes. People with agendas were after something. All none of his business any other time. But some of those same people had kidnapped his son and blown up his bookshop. No. This was personal.
He owed them.
And like Haddad, he intended to pay his debts.
But he needed to know more.
Haddad had been cryptic in his comments both before and after the Israelis appeared. Even worse, he’d never finished explaining what he’d noticed years ago—what exactly motivated Israel to kill him. Hoping that the leather satchel lying in his lap contained answers, he unbuckled the clasps and removed a book, three notebooks, and four maps.
The book was an eighteenth-century volume, the cover tooled leather and brittle like sun-dried skin. None of its lettering was legible, so he carefully parted the binding and read the title sheet.
A Hero�
�s Journey by Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius.
He scanned the pages.
A novel written more than two hundred years ago in an unimaginative and pedantic style. He wondered about its significance and hoped the notebooks would explain.
He thumbed through each one.
The tight script was Haddad’s, written in English. He read closer.
… the clues left with me by the Guardian have proven troubling. The hero’s quest is difficult. I’m afraid I’ve been the fool. But not the first. Thomas Bainbridge was also a foolish man. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, he apparently was extended an invitation to the library and completed the hero’s quest. A condition of the invitation must surely be that the visit stay private. The Guardians have not spent two millennia protecting their cache only to have it revealed by an invitee. But Bainbridge violated that trust and wrote of his experience. In an effort to ease his treachery, he couched his tale as fiction titled not so curiously, A Hero’s Journey. The book was printed in limited copies and hardly noticed. In Bainbridge’s day, the world was teeming with fantastic tales (novels regarded with little respect), so the protagonist’s journey to some mythical library was viewed with little enthusiasm. I found a copy three years ago, which I stole from a Welsh estate. Reading it offers little insight. Bainbridge, though, could not resist one final violation of the trust the Guardians placed in him. In the years before he died he erected an arbor in the garden of his Oxfordshire mansion. Into the marble he carved the image of a painting and Roman letters. The painting, by Nicolas Poussin, was originally known as Happiness Subdued by Death but its more common name today is The Shepherds of Arcadia II.
Malone knew little of Poussin, though he was familiar with the name. Luckily, in one of the notebooks, Haddad provided some details.
Poussin was a troubled soul, much like Bainbridge. He was born in Normandy in 1594, and the first thirty years of his life were ones of trials and tribulations. He suffered a lack of patrons, unappreciative courtesans, poor health, and debt. Even working on the ceiling in the Grand Gallery at the Louvre left him uninspired. Not until Poussin left France for Italy in 1642 did a change occur. That journey, which normally would have been one of a few weeks, took Poussin nearly six months. Once in Rome, Poussin began to paint with a new style and confidence, one that did not go unnoticed, one that quickly earned him the label as the most celebrated artist in Rome. Many have speculated that somewhere along his journey Poussin was inducted into a great secret. Interestingly, when The Shepherds of Arcadia was finished, the patron who commissioned the piece, Cardinal Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX, chose not to hang the work in public, but kept it in his private apartment. Rospigliosi was an artistic man with an interest in the arcane and esoteric. He possessed an outstanding personal library, and historians eventually labeled him “the freethinking pope.”
A clue as to what Poussin may have personally experienced can be found in a letter written six years after The Shepherds of Arcadia was completed. Its drafter, a priest, the brother of Louis XIV’s finance minister, thought what he’d learned from Poussin might be of interest to the French monarchy. I found the letter a few years ago among the archives of the Cossé-Brissac family:
He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail—things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.
Quite a statement—and puzzling, too. But what Bainbridge erected in his garden is even more puzzling. After completing The Shepherds of Arcadia, for some inexplicable reason, Poussin painted its reverse image in what has been labeled The Shepherds of Arcadia II. This is what Thomas Bainbridge chose for his marble bas-relief. Not the original, but its counter part. Bainbridge was clever, and for two hundred years his monument, ripe with symbolism, stood in obscurity.
Malone read on, his mind lost in a maze of possibilities. Unfortunately, Haddad did not reveal much more. The remainder of the notes dealt with the Old Testament, its translations, and its narrative inconsistencies. Not a word about what Haddad may have noticed that had generated so much interest. Nor was there any message from a Guardian. No details of any hero’s quest, only a fleeting reference at the end of one of the notebooks.
In the drawing room of Bainbridge Hall is more of Bainbridge’s arrogance. Its title is particularly reflective. The Epiphany of St. Jerome. Fascinating and fitting, as great quests often begin with an epiphany.
A bit more flesh to the bones, but still a lot of unanswered questions. And he’d learned that wrestling with questions that possessed no answers was the fastest way to immobilize the brain.
“What are you reading?”
He glanced up. Pam was still lying in the bed, head on the pillow, eyes open.
“What George left.”
She slowly sat up, cleared the sleep from her eyes, and checked her watch. “How long have I been out?”
“An hour or so. How’s the shoulder?”
“Sore.”
“It will be for a few days.”
She stretched her legs. “How many times were you shot, Cotton? Three?”
He nodded. “You don’t forget any of them.”
“Neither did I. If you recall, I took care of you.”
She had.
“I loved you,” she said. “I know you may not believe that. But I did.”
“You should have told me about Gary.”
“You hurt me with what you did. I never understood why you had to screw around on me. Why I wasn’t enough.”
“I was young. Stupid. Full of myself. It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake. And after, I was sorry. I tried to be a good husband. I really did.”
“How many women were there? You never said.”
He wasn’t going to lie. “Four. One-night stands, every one of them.” Now he wanted to know. “And you?”
“Just one. But I saw him for several months.”
That stung. “You loved him?”
“As much as a married woman could love somebody other than her husband.”
He saw her point.
“Gary came from that.” She seemed to be wrestling with a question mark that kept appearing from her past. “When I look at Gary a part of me is sometimes angry for what I did—God help me—but a part of me is grateful, too. Gary was always there. You came and went.”
“I loved you, Pam. I wanted to be your husband. I was really sorry for what I did.”
“It wasn’t enough,” she muttered, eyes to the floor. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I came to realize that it would never be enough. That’s why we stayed separated five years before we divorced. I wanted our marriage, but then again I didn’t.”
“You hated me that bad?”
“No. I hated myself, for what I did. It’s taken me years to come to that realization. Take it from one who knows, a person who hates herself is in a lot of trouble. She just doesn’t know it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Gary when it happened?”
“You didn’t deserve the truth. At least, that’s what I thought. Only in the past year have I realized the mistake. You screwed around, I screwed around, but I got pregnant. You’re right. I should have told you way back. But that’s maturity talking and, like you said, we were both young and stupid.”
She went silent. He did not intrude.
“That’s why I stay angry at you, Cotton. Can’t cuss myself out. But it’s also why I finally told you about Gary. You do realize that I didn’t have to say a word and you would have never known a thing? But I wanted to make it right. I wanted to make peace with you—”
“And with yourself.”
She slowly nodded. “Most of all.” Her voice broke.
“Why’d you come after me at Haddad’s? You knew there’d be shooting.”
“Let’s just say it was another foolish move.”
But he knew better. Time to tell her the truth. “You can’t go home to Atlanta. A man was following you in the airport. That’s why I came back.”
Her face was fixed in a brooding stare. “You should have told me.”
“Yeah, I should have.”
“Why would someone be following me?”
“Getting ready for another opportunity. Maybe a loose end that needed tying up.”
He saw she understood his meaning.
“They want to kill me?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. That’s the problem. We’re guessing.”
She lay back down on the bed, apparently too tired, sore, and bewildered to argue. “What are you going to do? Haddad’s dead. The Israelis should go away.”
“Which gives us an open-field run to find whatever it is George was looking for. That hero’s quest. He left this stuff on purpose. He wanted us to go.”
She settled her head on the pillow. “No. He wanted you to go.”
He saw her wince in pain. “Let me get you some ice for that shoulder. It’ll help.”
“I won’t argue with you.”
He stood, grabbed the empty bucket, and headed for the door.
“I would like to know what’s worth dying for,” she said.
He stopped. “You’d be surprised how little it can be.”
“I think I’ll call Gary while you’re gone,” she said. “I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“Tell him I miss him.”
“He’s okay there?”
“Henrik will take good care of him. No worries.”
“So where are we going to start looking?”
Good question. But then, as he stared across the room at the contents of the satchel, he knew there was only one answer.
THIRTY
LONDON
9:00 PM
Sabre stared out the window into the night. His operative, who’d been waiting at Heathrow Airport for Malone to arrive, had followed the ex-agent to this apartment, which sat on a solid block of gabled buildings that surely coddled neat lives, good order, and careful privacy.