WASHINGTON, DC
10:30 AM
STEPHANIE DID NOT LIKE HER NEW APPEARANCE. HER SILVERBLOND hair was now a light auburn, the result of a quick coloring by Cassiopeia. Different makeup, new clothes, and a pair of clear eyeglasses completed the alteration. Not perfect, but enough to help her hide in public.
“I haven’t worn Geraldine wool trousers in a long time,” she said to Cassiopeia.
“I paid a lot for them, so take care.”
She grinned. “As if you can’t afford it.”
A crew-neck blouse and navy jacket rounded out the outfit. They were sitting in the rear of a cab, trudging through late-morning traffic.
“I hardly recognize you,” Cassiopeia said.
“You saying I dress like an old woman?”
“Your wardrobe could use a little updating.”
“Maybe if I survive all this, you can take me shopping.”
An amused light gathered in Cassiopeia’s eyes. Stephanie liked this woman. Her confidence could be infectious.
They were headed to Larry Daley’s house. He lived in Cleveland Park, a beautiful residential neighborhood not far from the National Cathedral. Once the summer refuge for Washingtonians seeking escape from the city heat, now it harbored quirky shops, trendy cafés, and a popular art deco theater.
She told the driver to stop three blocks away from the address and paid the fare. They walked the remainder of the way.
“Daley’s an arrogant ass,” Stephanie said. “Thinks no one’s watching him. But he keeps records. Stupid as hell, if you ask me, but he does it.”
“How did you get close to him?”
“He’s a womanizer. I simply provided him an opportunity.”
“Pillow talk?”
“The worst kind.”
The house was another of the former Victorian retreats. She’d at first wondered how Daley could afford the surely astronomical mortgage, but learned that it was a rental. A sticker in a ground-floor window announced that the property was alarmed. It was the middle of the day, and Daley would be at the White House, where he stayed for at least eighteen hours. The conservative press loved to extol his work ethic, but Stephanie wasn’t fooled. He just didn’t want to be out of the loop, not for a moment.
“Make you a deal,” she said.
Cassiopeia’s face melted into a cunning grin. “You want me to break in?”
“Then I’ll handle the alarm.”
SABRE WAS ADJUSTING TO THE PERSONALITY OF JIMMY McCollum. The name itself was another matter. He hadn’t used it in a long time but thought it prudent, given that Malone might well check him out. If so, he would appear in army records. There was a birth certificate, Social Security card, and little more, because he’d changed his name once he moved to Europe. Dominick Sabre added a note of confidence and mystique. The men who’d hired him knew little but his name, so it was important that the label convey the right allure. He’d come across it in a German cemetery, an aristocrat who died in the 1800s.
Now he was Jimmy McCollum again.
His mother named him James, after her father, whom he’d called Big Daddy-one of the few males in his life who’d shown him respect. He never knew his own father, nor did he believe that his mother actually knew which one of her lovers could be blamed. Though she’d been a good mother and treated him with kindness, she’d been a dismal woman, drifting from man to man, marrying three times, and squandering her money. He left home when he was eighteen to join the army. She’d wanted him to go to college, but academics didn’t interest him. Instead, like his mother, opportunity was what drew him.
Unlike her, though, he’d managed to seize every one that had come his way.
The army. Special forces. Europe. The Chairs.
For sixteen years he’d labored for others, doing their bidding, accepting their tokens, satisfied with their meager praise.
Now it was time to labor for himself.
Risky? Certainly.
But the Circle respected power, admired cleverness, and negotiated only with strength. He wanted a membership. Perhaps even a Chair. Even more, if the lost Library of Alexandria contained what Alfred Hermann believed, he might well be able to affect the world.
That meant Power.
In his hands.
He had to find the library.
And the man sitting across the aisle on the TAP flight from London to Lisbon was going to lead the way.
Cotton Malone and his ex-wife had solved the first part of the hero’s quest in only a few minutes. He was confident they could decipher the rest and, once that was done, he’d eliminate them both.
But he wasn’t stupid. Malone would certainly be wary.
He’d just have to be unpredictable.
STEPHANIE WATCHED AS CASSIOPEIA TRIPPED THE LOCK ON the back door to Larry Daley’s house.
“Less than a minute,” she said. “Not bad. They teach you that at Oxford?”
“Actually, I did learn to pick my first lock there. A liquor cabinet, if I recall.”
She opened the door and listened.
Beeps dinged from an adjacent hall. Stephanie raced to the keypad and punched in a four-digit code, hoping the fool hadn’t altered the sequence.
The beeping stopped and the indicator light changed from red to green.
“How did you know?”
“My girl watched him enter it.”
Cassiopeia shook her head. “Is he an idiot?”
“It’s called thinking with the wrong head. He thought she was there only to please him.”
She studied the sunlit interior. A modern décor. Lots of black, silver, white, and gray. Abstract art dotted the walls. No meaning anywhere. No feeling. How fitting.
“What are we after?” Cassiopeia asked.
“This way.”
She followed a short hall to an alcove that, she knew, served as an office. Her agent had reported that Daley downloaded everything onto password-secured flash drives, never keeping any data on either his laptop or White House computer. The call girl her agent had hired to seduce Daley spotted that idiosyncracy one evening while Daley worked on the computer and she worked on him.
She told Cassiopeia what she knew. “Unfortunately, she didn’t actually see his hiding place.”
“Too busy?”
She smiled. “We all have our jobs. And don’t knock it. Call girls are some of the most productive sources.”
“And you say I’m twisted.”
“We need to find his hiding place.”
Cassiopeia plopped down into a wooden desk chair that accepted her meager weight with squeaks and groans. “Has to be in easy reach.”
Stephanie inventoried the alcove. The desk supported a blotter, a pen-and-pencil holder, and pictures of Daley with the president and vice president, along with a reading lamp. A narrow set of floor-to-ceiling shelves consumed two of the walls. The whole alcove was about six feet square. The floor, like the rest of the house, was hardwood.
Not many hiding places.
The books on the shelves drew her attention. Daley seemed to love political treatises. There weren’t many-a hundred or so. Paperbacks and hardcovers mixed, many of the bindings veined with cracks, indicating that the pages had been read. She shook her head. “A connoisseur of modern politics, and he reads all sides.”
“Why do you have such an attitude toward him?”
“Just always felt like I need to take a shower after being around him. Not to mention he tried to fire me from day one.” She paused. “And finally succeeded.”
A key scraped in the front-door lock.
Stephanie’s head whirled. She stared back down the hall toward the front of the house.
The door opened and she heard Larry Daley’s voice. Then she heard another person. Female.
Heather Dixon.
She motioned and they darted down the hall into one of the bedrooms.
“Let me get the alarm,” Daley said.
A few seconds of silence.
“That’s strange,” Daley said.
“Problem?”
Stephanie immediately knew. She’d neglected to reset the system after they’d entered.
“I’m sure I set that alarm before I left,” Daley said.
A few moments of silence, then she heard the click of a bullet being chambered.
“Let’s take a look around,” Dixon said.