The Alexandria Link

  “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. r />
  “Let’s take a look around,” Dixon said.

  FORTY-SIX

  LISBON

  3:30 PM

  MALONE STARED AT THE MONASTERY OF SANTA MARIA DE Belém. He, Pam, and Jimmy McCollum had flown from London to Lisbon then taken a cab from the airport to the waterfront.

  Lisbon sat perched on a broad switchback of hills that overlooked the sea-like Tejo estuary, a place of wide symmetrical boulevards and handsome tree-filled squares. One of the world’s grandest suspension bridges spanned the mighty river and led to a towering statue of Christ, arms outstretched, which embraced the city from the eastern shore. Malone had visited many times and was always reminded of San Francisco, both in physical makeup and in the city’s propensity for earthquakes. Several had left their mark.

  All countries possessed splendid things. Egypt, the pyramids. Italy, St. Peter’s. England, Westminster. France, Versailles. Listening to the cabdriver on the ride from the airport, he knew that, for Portugal, national pride came from the abbey that sprawled out before him. Its white limestone façade stretched longer than a football field, aged like old ivory, and combined Moorish, Byzantine, and French Gothic in an exuberance of decorations that seemed to breathe life into the towering walls.

  People crowded everywhere. A camera-toting parade streamed in and out from the entrances. Across a busy boulevard and train tracks that fronted the impressive south façade, tourist buses waited in an angled line, like ships moored in a harbor. A sign informed visitors of how the abbey was first erected in 1500 to satisfy a promise made by King Manuel I to the Virgin Mary and was built on the site of an old mariners’ hospice first constructed by Prince Henry the Navigator. Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan had all prayed here before their journeys. Through the centuries the massive structure had served as a religious house, a retirement home, and an orphanage. Now it was a World Heritage Site, restored to much of its former glory.

  “The church and abbey are dedicated to St. Jerome,” he heard one of the tour guides say to a crowd in Italian. “Symbolic in that both Jerome and this monastery represented new points of departure for Christianity. Ships left here to discover the New World and bring them Christ. Jerome translated the ancient Bible into Latin, so more could discover its wonder.” He could tell that McCollum understood the woman, too.

  “Italian one of your languages?” he asked.

  “I know enough.”

  “A man of many talents.”

  “Whatever’s necessary.”

  He caught the surly attitude. “So what’s next in this quest?”

  McCollum produced another slip of paper upon which was written some of the first excerpt and more of the cryptic phrases.

  It is a mystery, but visit the chapel beside the Tejo, in Bethlehem, dedicated to our patron saint. Begin the journey in the shadows and complete it in the light, where a retreating star finds a rose, pierces a wooden cross, and converts silver to gold. Find the place that forms an address with no place, where is found an other place. Then, like the shepherds of the painter Poussin, puzzled by the enigma, you will be flooded with the light of inspiration.

  He handed the sheet to Pam and said, “Okay. Let’s take a visit and see what’s there.”

  They followed a thick swarm of tourists to the entrance. A sign indicated that admission to the church was free, but a ticket was required for the rest of the buildings.

  Inside the church, in what was identified as the lower choir, the groined ceiling loomed low and produced an imposing gloom. To his left stood the cenotaph of Vasco da Gama. Simple and solemn, it abounded with nautical symbols. Another tomb, of the poet Luis de Camões, rested to his right along with a baptismal font. Bare walls in both niches added to both the austerity and the grandeur. People crowded the alcoves. Cameras flashed. Tour guides droned on about the significance of the dead.

  Malone strolled into the nave and the initial dimness of the lower choir gave way to a bright wonder. Six slender columns, each a profusion of ornamentation twined with carved flowers, stretched skyward. The late-afternoon sun poured through a series of stained-glass windows. Rays and shadows chased one another across the limestone walls, gray with age. The vaulted roof resembled a sheaf of ribs, the columns like canopy supports, the mesh holding in place like a ship’s rigging. Malone felt the presence of Saracens who once ruled Lisbon, and noticed Byzantine fancies. A thousand details multiplied around him without repetition.

  Remarkable.

  Even more remarkable, he thought, given that ancient masons possessed the nerve to build something so massive upon Lisbon’s quivering ground.

  Wooden pews that once accommodated monks now held only the inquisitive. A low murmur of voices echoed across the nave, periodically overshadowed by a calm voice through a public address system that requested silence in a variety of languages. Malone located the source of the admonition. A priest before a microphone, at the people’s altar, in the center of the cross-shaped interior. Nobody seemed to pay the warning any heed—especially not the tour guides, who continued on with their paid discourses.

  “This place is magnificent,” Pam said.

  He agreed. “The sign out front said it closes at five. We need tickets to the rest.”

  “I’ll go get them,” McCollum said. “But doesn’t the clue lead us only here, to the church?”

  “I have no idea. To be sure, let’s have a look at whatever else there is.”

  McCollum made his way back through the clot of people to the portico.

  “What do you think?” Pam asked, still holding the sheet of paper.

  “About him or the quest?”

  “Both are a problem.”

  He smiled. She was right. But as for the quest, “Some of it now makes sense. Begin the journey in the shadows and complete it in the light. The entrance does that nicely. Like a basement back there, then it opens into a bright attic.”

  The priest again quietly admonished the crowd to stay silent and everyone again ignored him.

  “He has a tough job,” Pam said.

  “Like the kid taking names when the teacher leaves the room.”

  “Okay, Mr. Genius,” she said. “What about where a retreating star finds a rose, pierces a wooden cross, and converts silver to gold. Find the place that forms an address with no place, where is found another place.”

  He was already thinking about that and his attention was drawn forward, to the chancel, where a rectangular floor plan led to a concave wall backdropping the high altar, all topped with a combination of hemispherical dome, barrel vault, and stone-coffered ceiling. Ionic and Corinthian pillars rose symmetrically on three sides of the chancel, framing vaulted stone chambers that displayed elaborate royal tombs. Five paintings wrapped the concave wall, everything drawing the eye to the majestic baroque sacrarium that stood in the center, elevated, above the high altar.

  He wove his way around loitering tourists to the far side of the people’s altar. Velvet ropes blocked any entrance to the chancel. A placard informed him that the sacrarium, made entirely of silver, had been crafted by goldsmith João de Sousa between 1674 and 1678. Even from fifty feet away the ornate repository, full of detail, appeared magnificent.

  He turned and stared back through the nave, past the pillars and pews, to the lower choir, where they’d entered.

  Then he saw it. In the upper choir, past a thick stone balustrade, fifty feet above the church floor. High in the farthest exterior wall, a huge eye glared down at him. The circular window stretched ten feet or more in diameter. Mullions and traceries radiated from its center. Roof ribs wound a twisting path back toward it and seemed to dissolve into its shadowless radiance, bright as a stage lamp and suffusing the church’s interior.

  A common adornment to many medieval churches. Named after its fanciful shape.

  Rose window.

  Facing due west. Late in the day. Blazing like the sun.

  But there was more.

  At the center of the upper choir’s balustrade stood a la
rge cross. He stepped forward and noticed that the cross fit perfectly into the round of the window, the brilliant rays flooding past it into the nave.

  Where a retreating star finds a rose, pierces a wooden cross, and converts silver to gold.

  Seems they’d found the place.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  VIENNA

  4:30 PM

  THORVALDSEN ADMIRED ALFRED HERMANN’S SPECTACLE OF flowers, water, and marble, the enormous garden an obvious labor of several generations. Shady walks wound out from the château to grassy glades, the brick paths lined with statues, bas-reliefs, and fountains. Every so often French influences yielded to a clear taste for Italy.

  “Who are the people who own this place?” Gary asked.

  “The Hermanns are a family of long standing in Austria, just as my family is in Denmark. Quite wealthy and powerful.”

  “Is he your friend?”

  An interesting question, considering his suspicions. “Up until a few days ago, I believed that to be the case. But now I’m not so sure.”

  He was pleased with the boy’s inquisitiveness. He knew about Gary’s parentage. When he’d returned from taking Gary back home after their summer visit, Malone had told him what Pam had revealed. Thorvaldsen had feigned ignorance when he’d first seen her a few nights ago, though he’d instantly known her identity. Her presence in his house, with Malone, signaled trouble, which was why he’d stationed Jesper outside the study door. Pam Malone was high-strung. Luckily she’d calmed down. She should have been back in Georgia by now. Instead, the caller from Tel Aviv had said, Seems Malone and his ex-wife are presently on their way to Lisbon.

  What was happening? Why go there? And where was the Talons of the Eagle?

  “We’ve come here,” he said to Gary, “to help your father.”

  “Dad never said anything about us leaving. He told me to stay put and be careful.”

  “But he also said for you to do as I say.”

  “So when he yells at me, I expect you to take the blame.”

  He grinned. “With pleasure.”