Zane sighed and reached for the seven files that Shelley had prepared.
“The first page of each file is a summary. You just need to sign on the bottom right.”
Shelley’s pulse raced. She felt herself getting warm and feared that her face was turning bright red. He would notice. He would see that something wasn’t right. Zane opened the first file and looked up reproachfully at his assistant.
“You call this a ‘summary’? Goddamn it, Shelley, your job is to save me time. It’s going to take me forty-five minutes to read all these so-called ‘summaries.’ It’s out of the question. Do I look like I have the time to read job applications?”
“Excuse me, sir, but HR and I have already double-checked everything. You don’t need to read them. Trust me.”
Fuck! she thought. She’d used the trigger word. If there was one personal trait that Warden Zane lacked, it was a capacity to trust anyone. She knew she’d screwed up. Now he’d go through everything in minute detail and spot the deception. And her son’s life was on the line. Just then, the security door opened with a beep and a guard named Coby Chapman entered Zane’s office.
“Excuse the interruption, sir. We have a problem in section 12.”
“And you can’t take care of it yourself?” Zane sounded irritated. Shelley seized her chance.
“HR is waiting for the paperwork, sir. The staffing situation is getting unsustainable.” She looked at her watch. “If these doesn’t go back today, with the holiday season coming, we’re going to have a real problem.”
“Shelley’s right,” Chapman confirmed.
“Why do I even have staff if I have to do everything myself?” Zane snorted.
He reached for his Montblanc fountain pen and opened and signed the files quickly, one after another. Then he stood up and strode past Chapman. “Let’s go solve a problem,” he said.
The door fell closed and Shelley was alone. Her heart was racing and it took a few moments before she realized that she had done it. She’d gotten into the human resources department, taken the job applications, changed the details as the Englishman had instructed, and organized Zane’s signature. She had done everything he’d demanded of her. She left the office and went back to HR. There was still no one in the office yet, so she left the paperwork. HR would inform the new employees tomorrow. And she’d get Dylan back.
46
The Alcázar of Seville, Spain
On the way upstairs, Hellen ran through her plan one more time. She was doubly grateful to Eloisa for her tips. She had just reached the top of the stairwell, decorated with Moorish tiles, and had stopped to orient herself when she saw the first guard standing at the end of the long corridor. He immediately turned in her direction. Hellen walked toward him as confidently as she could, although her knees were trembling and she was afraid she’d go sprawling, tray and all, at the man’s feet. He looked at her suspiciously at first, then his face lit up when he saw what was on her tray.
“Eloisa sends greetings from the kitchen,” Hellen said. Her Spanish was good, but far from perfect. But during her studies she’d spent a summer on Majorca, where she acquired a little mallorquí, the dialect of the Balearic island. She hoped it would be enough to avoid detection. The guard noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and simply took a big bite of the beef Wellington sandwich. Hellen smiled at him and lifted the second plate.
“This one’s for your partner,” she said.
The man nodded, munching happily. Hellen turned left and passed through a series of stunningly decorated rooms. She had spent a good deal of time in Schönbrunn Palace and other such edifices that had been turned into museums, but it was rare for a royal family to still use the museum as a residence. And even though she was there on a secret mission, she could not switch off her inner historian. She admired the beautiful arched hallways and the evolving range of styles that had been in the various additions and renovations over the centuries. In a room with delicate ceiling frescos, she even caught herself standing, staring open-mouthed in awe. It was almost physically painful for her not to be able to stop and study the Mudéjar architecture more closely. She came to a wide corridor where she saw the second guard at his post. Now everything depended on whether Eloisa’s tip would really work. With her sweetest smile, she handed the man the plate, and he bit into his sandwich as enthusiastically as the first guard had.
“The queen’s having another one of her migraines,” Hellen said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “And of course she’s forgotten her medicine again.”
Eloisa had told Hellen that the queen was constantly forgetting her migraine tablets, and one of the servants would always be running through half the palace to fetch them for her.
The guard was silent for a moment. He looked at Hellen, looked at the plate with the sandwich, looked at Hellen again. He shook his head, at first serious, but then he began to smile. “She’s never going to remember, is she? She forgets her pills all the time,” he said. He was smiling broadly now, and Hellen realized that the man was exceptionally good looking.
What a crappy job I’ve got, she thought. A palace. Fabulous architecture. Dashing Spaniards . . . and instead of actually enjoying it, I’m stealing a treasure map. The guard took another bite and Hellen disappeared into the royal bedroom.
The room was so impressive that she had trouble focusing on her goal. This was the Mudéjar style at its finest, combining construction concepts and decorative forms from Islamic architecture—horseshoe arches, honeycomb vaulting, Moresque and stucco ornamentation, majolica vases and pottery—with the stylistic repertoire of the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods. Hellen saw a magnificent artesonado wooden ceiling with the vaulted dome typical of the Mudéjar style, with ribs passing beside the apex of the vault, allowing it to open at the top into a lantern-like recess.
With a heavy heart, Hellen ignored all of it and went straight to the head of the bed. She pushed her hand between the headboard and the wall and immediately felt the light leather folder tucked away there. A few seconds later, she had taken it out and concealed it under her apron. She already had the door handle in her hand, ready to leave, when her heart almost stopped. The tablets! Hellen turned back, whipped open the nightstand drawer, and took out the small box. Then she left the room, waving the box like a trophy under the nose of the chewing guard. As soon as she was out of the man’s line of sight, she ran, only slowing down again when she came to the first guard. She sidled past him, then ran down the stairs to the bottom, where she turned toward the kitchen.
Cloutard, just returning from the banquet hall, saw her. She waved to him and Cloutard nodded. Eloisa was nowhere in sight—time for them to go.
47
CIA safe house, 17 Ambrose Street, London
Tom, momentarily stunned by the blast, coughed and shook his head. The air was thick with dust. Lucky, Tom thought, just a few scratches. He scrambled to his feet. Devastation wherever he looked: cables dangled from the caved-in ceiling, and the back of the apartment had been partially torn off.
“Jack? Anthony?” Tom shouted. At first, he got no response, but then something moved in the haze. A groan. A cough. A cry.
“I’m here. I’m pinned,” Jack gasped. “Where’s Anthony?” Tom picked his way cautiously through the apartment. The whole place looked like it might collapse at any moment. Then he saw a section of the sofa and Anthony’s hand protruding from beneath a large chunk of concrete that had crashed from the floor above. Anthony hadn’t made it.
“He’s dead,” said Tom, and he stumbled through the destruction toward Jack’s voice. He heaved pieces of rubble aside and finally found the injured CIA man.
“Fuck, Wagner, what kind of goddamned amateur are you? You led ’em straight to us.”
Jack was on his back with a piece of rebar through his thigh, literally nailing him to the floor.
“Believe me, that’s impossible. I was careful. No one followed me.” But the man had a point. How did Cueball kno
w where I was? How did he know about the safe house? Tom had to hurry. The Kahle could show up any second to finish the job.
“Forget about me. Finish your mission. Looks like it’s pretty important after all. Just get me a gun.” He nodded toward the next room. Tom had to climb over a fallen beam to get inside, but the destruction was not as complete in there. The gun cabinet had tipped over onto its front and was buried under several pieces of concrete. Clearing them aside, Tom suddenly heard a noise from the room he’d just left. He stopped what he was doing and quietly took cover.
“Where’s the case?” he heard the Kahle ask. Tom peeked cautiously around the corner. The assassin was leaning over the injured agent.
“What case?” Jack said, coughing and grimacing. Every movement he made seemed to cause him extreme pain.
The Kahle crouched and gripped the iron bar sticking out of Jack’s thigh. He gave it a shake, and Jack’s scream cut Tom to the bone.
“The case Wagner was supposed to drop here,” the Kahle said with frightening calm, almost fondly, in his German accent.
Tom thought feverishly. He couldn’t reach the guns, not now. Turning the cabinet over would make too much noise.
“Kiss my ass, you fucking Nazi.” In a final rush of courage and rage, Jack spat in the Kahle’s face.
“Have it your way.” The assassin stood up, wiped away the spittle, and fired two shots at point blank range from his assault rifle into Jack. Then he turned away, disappeared into another room, and began hunting for the case. This was Tom’s chance. He grabbed the gun cabinet and, with all his strength, heaved it onto its side. He whipped open the door and took the first gun he found: an StG77, a standard-issue Austrian assault rifle. The noise alerted the Kahle, of course, and a hail of bullets immediately flew past the cabinet, where Tom had taken cover. Tom grabbed a Glock, too, jamming it under his waistband before returning fire.
“Is that you, Wagner?” the Kahle shouted from behind a wall. Tom heard him reloading, and used the moment to move to a more secure position.
“Yep. How’s the head? I’ll bet hitting the windshield like that left a mark,” Tom said in his best smart-ass voice. He swung around the corner and fired a few quick rounds at the Kahle’s hiding place.
“Give me the case and I’ll make it short and painful. Or don’t—and I’ll make it last.”
“Keep dreaming,” Tom said. This time, the Kahle fired, but neither his shots nor Tom’s had any effect. Stalemate. “We can play this game until one of us runs out of ammo. Or we can settle it like men,” Tom suggested.
The Kahle thought for a moment. “Okay. On three, we throw our guns away and come out,” he said confidently.
“Deal,” said Tom. He c0unted down from three, then tossed his rifle around the corner. The Kahle did the same. “And no tricks,” Tom added innocently.
Slowly, Tom stepped into the open. The Kahle appeared from behind the opposite wall. Grinning, he stalked toward Tom, taking out a huge knife as he moved.
“Gotcha. Only you would bring a knife to a gunfight,” Tom said, and he drew the Glock and emptied the magazine into the Kahle’s chest. The force spun the man around and he lay where he fell, unmoving.
Tom took a deep, relieved breath and pushed the gun back under his waistband. He had to hurry. He could already hear sirens wailing in the distance, and the way things looked, he’d better be as far away as possible before emergency services showed up. They’d try to pin this mess on him, too. He grabbed a few spare magazines from the gun cabinet and left. Outside, he grabbed the case from where he’d hidden it in the trash container, swung onto the motorcycle and roared away. Not a moment too soon: a fire engine, paramedics and police screeched to a halt at the front of the building. He had to contact the president as soon as he could.
48
Heathrow Airport, London
Tom quickly restored his phone book from the cloud and dialed the president’s number. Let’s hear it for the Internet, he thought. Who remembers phone numbers anymore?
“Who is this?” Tom asked, when the connection went through.
“Rupert, sir,” replied the president’s secret service agent. It was the same agent who’d taken him to Samson the day before. “The president’s in a WHO conference right now. He will call you back when—” But Rupert did not get to say anything else, because just then Jordan Armstrong snatched the phone out of his hand.
“This is Chief of Staff Armstrong. Who am I speaking to?”
“Wagner, sir. Tom Wagner,” Tom said, puzzled.
“Wagner.” Armstrong lowered his voice and moved a few steps away from Rupert. “When we heard about the CIA safe house, we feared the worst. Where are you now?”
“Where’s President Samson? I’m only speaking to him,” Tom replied.
“The president won’t be reachable for the rest of the day. He asked me to look after you.” After a short pause, Armstrong said, “Have you got it?”
Tom thought for a second. Could he trust Armstrong? Someone had tried to feed him to the wolves, and he had to find out who. His options were very limited at the moment, but he knew he had to get out of London. As far away as possible, ideally out of the country. He had no interest in trying to solve his problems from inside a prison cell.
“I’ve got it. But someone else is after it, and whoever it was knew exactly where I would be. I have to get off the street as fast as possible.”
“I’m not surprised, after the chaos you caused in Cornwall and here in London.”
“First of all, that wasn’t me. That was Friedrich von wherever-the-fuck, one of AF’s assassins. I haven’t killed anyone except him, and I only got him after he blew up the CIA safe house.”
“Okay. Then you’ll come with us to D.C. We’ll sort it all out there. Sound good?”
It did sound good, in fact. And there was no way he was going to turn down an offer to fly in Air Force One. “Okay. Where do I go?”
“Rupert will give you the details. And Tom, keep your head down and don’t go destroying any more buildings. The British are our allies, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then Rupert was back on the line, and as promised he told Tom all he needed to know. When Tom hung up, he took a deep breath—this was the first good news in the last forty-eight hours. His tension eased a little, and his mind turned for the first time in a while to Hellen and Cloutard. And to the fact that he’d presumably sacrificed his job at Blue Shield. This was the second time he’d left Theresia de Mey stranded, not to mention his team, and it was highly doubtful that Theresia would give him a third chance.
Tom looked at the phone that Jack had given him less than an hour before. Jack . . . he didn’t even know the man’s last name. Ironic, he thought, recalling that fallen agents were honored with no more than a star on the wall at CIA headquarters, in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley.
He had to get in touch with Hellen and tell her everything that had happened. Her phone rang, but no one picked up. Disappointed, he put the phone away again and headed for the meeting point he’d agreed upon with Rupert.
49
Garden of the Alcázar of Seville
Hellen and Cloutard were still out of breath. They had left the palace in a hurry, exiting into the walled Jardin de la Danza and passing 16th-century fountains and columns with satyrs and nymphs in the dark, until they reached one of the exits leading to the outer gardens. Hellen looked around nervously.
“We’d better hide,” she said, “in case someone’s followed us. We need to find a way out of here without being seen. There are guards everywhere.” Her voice betrayed her uneasiness.
“I have never in my life been caught on one of my . . . sorties. And that is not going to happen tonight, either. But you are right. We need a hiding place,” Cloutard said.
“Yes. Then we can take a closer look at this map.” Hellen pointed ahead. “There’s a labyrinth that way. No one will disturb us there.”
They jogged on
about a hundred yards and came to the entrance to the labyrinth, which had been added to the gardens only in the 20th century.
“Are you sure about this?” Cloutard asked, looking dubiously at the sign marking the entrance.
“It’s the only place in the gardens where the lights don’t reach,” Hellen said, pointing to the two spotlights slowly sweeping the gardens.
“Considering how strict the security is, we got inside very easily,” Cloutard said.
“Well, maybe you and I understand ‘easily’ differently,” said Hellen, heading down the first path into the maze. Cloutard still hesitated. “François, don’t worry. You’re with a scientist. I’m not a mathematician, I admit, but I know the strategy for getting out of a labyrinth,” she said, and she beckoned Cloutard to follow her.
He tilted his head left and right and finally decided to ignore his misgivings. They turned a few corners, then Hellen stopped, sat down on the ground and unrolled the map. Cloutard turned on the flashlight on his phone, and they examined the map together.
“Hmm. I think we’re going to have to rethink the history of the Spanish conquistadors,” said Hellen.
Cloutard narrowed his eyes, clueless. “By which you mean . . .?” he asked.
Hellen took out her phone and opened the maps app. “This,” she said, pointing first at the Cortés map and then at her phone’s display. “This is the coast of Belize. It’s generally believed that the conquistadors arrived here in 1525, when they encountered descendants of the Maya. But that doesn’t actually seem to be true, because this map was drawn by Cortés himself in 1524. Look, he added the date here.” She pointed to a year handwritten below the title.
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