The Navigator
“Angela.”
A woman’s voice had called her name.
Adriano’s first instinct was to attack the intruder. He advanced toward the sound of the voice. He would batter the newcomer to the floor, quickly dispose of her, and then return to Angela.
He rounded a corner and saw two people near the door. A red-haired woman and a man who was even taller than Adriano. They seemed startled by his appearance but rallied quickly.
“Where’s Angela?” the woman said.
He said nothing. But there was an audible whimper from the stacks. Angela.
They showed by their aggressive posture that they had no intention of yielding. The man started toward him. The woman was circling around behind.
Adriano wasn’t used to resistance. The situation was becoming complex. He feinted toward the man, then turned and ran for the exit door. He hit a light switch and fled the room.
“Angela, are you okay?” Gamay said. “It’s the Trouts.”
“Be careful,” Angela warned. “He’s after me.”
The room lights came on again.
Angela rushed out and threw her arms around Gamay. Her body was wracked by sobs.
Paul made a quick survey of the room. Then he opened the exit door and stepped out into the hallway. All was quiet. He returned to the stacks room. “He’s gone. Who was that creep?”
“I don’t know,” Angela said. “He killed Helen. Then he came after me. He knew my name.”
“The front door was unlocked,” Paul said. “We got lost trying to find your office and heard your scream. You say he killed your boss?”
Although she hated to go back to the murder scene, she led them along the corridor to Woolsey’s office. Trout pushed the door open with his toe and stepped inside. He went to the desk and put his ear close to Woolsey’s gaping mouth but neither heard nor felt her breath. He hadn’t expected her to be alive after seeing the angle of her head and the marks on her throat.
He stepped back into the hallway. Gamay had her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. She saw the grave expression on her husband’s face and called 911 on her cell phone. Then they went outside and stood near the front stairs to wait for the police.
The patrol car showed up within five minutes. Two Philadelphia police officers got out of the car and, after talking to the Trouts and Angela, they called for backup. They drew their guns. One went inside while the other walked around the building.
Adriano slipped out from behind the shelter of a tree growing in a small park across from the library entrance. The red-and-blue lights from the police car reflected off his soft features. He stared with curiosity at the tall man and the red-haired woman who had interrupted his hunt.
Another cruiser screeched to a halt and two more policemen got out.
Adriano melted back into the shadows and left the library grounds without being seen. He was a patient man. He knew where Angela lived. And when she came home that night, he would be waiting.
NUMA 7 - The Navigator
Chapter 35
AUSTIN WAS IN THE NETHERLAND between sleep and consciousness when he sensed a change in the Citation’s attitude and speed. He opened his eyes and peered out the window. He recognized the tapestry of lights spread out below as Washington and the densely populated Virginia suburbs.
Carina was asleep, her head resting on his shoulder. He tapped her arm. “We’re home.”
She woke up and yawned. “The last thing I remember, we were taking off from Paris.”
“You were telling me about your plans for the exhibition.”
“Sorry.” She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “I’ll go back to my hotel and get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow morning I’ll take the train to New York. I have to talk to the people at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about the opening.”
“You’re going ahead with the tour even without the Navigator?”
“I don’t have much choice. Looking on the bright side, the news about the statue’s theft may bring in more people.”
Austin groped for words that wouldn’t make him sound paternal. “In view of past events, do you think it’s a good idea for you to be traveling on your own?”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, Kurt, but only a few people will know my plans.” She yawned again. “Do you think I’m still in danger?”
Austin compressed his lips in a tight smile. He didn’t want to scare Carina, but she needed to be aware that she had a bull’s-eye painted on her back.
“Our friend Buck said that you were a kidnapping target. The people he worked for have a long reach. We saw that in Turkey.”
Carina tilted her stubborn chin up at an imperious angle. “I’m not going to let anyone make me spend the rest of my days hiding in a closet.”
“Don’t blame you. I’d like to offer a compromise,” Austin said. “Stay at the boathouse tonight. I’ll prepare a sumptuous dinner of Thai takeout. Sleep off your jet lag and get a good start in the morning.”
“I’d like that,” Carina said without hesitation.
The pilot announced that the plane was making its approach to DullesAirport and would be on the ground in fifteen minutes. Austin glanced across the aisle. Zavala looked like a dead man sleeping. He could fall asleep on a bed of nails and be up at a moment’s notice, ready to spring into action.
Austin removed the cell phone from Zavala’s jacket and put in a call to the Trouts. Paul answered. Austin said he was back from Turkey and asked if he and Gamay had received the Jefferson file.
“We’ve read it,” Paul said. “We’ve got a good rendering of a ship of Tarshish, but need more information to plot a course. But you need to know something, Kurt: We followed a lead to the American Philosophical Society and stumbled into a real snake pit.”
“I have a problem imagining that venerable institution of learning as a nest of vipers.”
“Times have changed. Shortly after we visited the library, a librarian was killed. Her assistant would have met a similar fate if Gamay and I hadn’t showed up and chased the killer away.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“Yeah. Big guy, with a baby face and round blue eyes.”
“I’ve met the gentleman. Is the assistant okay?”
“Still a bit shaky. We persuaded her to get out of Philadelphia after the police finished interviewing her. She wanted to stop by her apartment. We insisted that she come directly to Georgetown. Gamay loaned her some clothes that fit, more or less.”
“I’d like to meet her. How about seven o’clock tomorrow?”
“We’ll bring the doughnuts and coffee. You haven’t told me about your trip to Istanbul.”
“Turkey has a snake infestation problem too. See you in the morning.”
The thump of the plane’s landing gear on the tarmac woke Zavala up from his sound sleep. He looked out the window. “Home so soon?”
Austin handed the cell phone back. “You dreamed your way across the Atlantic.”
Zavala puffed out his cheeks. “I was having nightmares about eunuchs, thanks to you.”
The plane taxied away from the general aviation area to a special NUMA hangar. The three passengers debarked and carefully loaded the plaster casts along with the baggage into a Jeep Cherokee from the NUMA motor pool. Austin dropped Zavala off and drove to his boathouse after stopping to pick up an order of Thai food.
Dinner was on the deck, with selections from Austin’s collection of progressive jazz in the background. He and Carina sipped brandy to the music of John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson and agreed not to discuss the mysteries surrounding the Navigator. They talked about their work instead. Carina matched every NUMA adventure with a fascinating episode of her own.
The combination of brandy and hours of travel took its toll, and Carina started to nod off. Austin showed her to the bedroom in the Victorian turret, and, unable to sleep, he went back down to his study. He stretched out in a comfortable leather chair and studied the amber liquor in his glass as if h
e were looking into a crystal ball. In his mind, he went over every detail, starting with the SOS from the oil rig.
He was hoping his ruminations would produce a picture with the clarity of a Rembrandt, but what he got was a Jackson Pollock abstract. He rose from his chair, went to a bookcase, and found Anthony Saxon’s book. He settled back into his chair and began to read.
ANTHONY SAXON was a true adventurer. He had hacked his way through the jungle to discover long-lost South American ruins. He had narrowly escaped death at the hands of nomadic desert tribesmen. He had rummaged through countless dusty tombs and made the acquaintance of numerous mummies. If only a tenth of what he wrote was true, Saxon was cut from the same mold as such famous explorers as Hiram Bingham, Stanley and Livingstone, and Indiana Jones.
Several years before, Saxon had launched what could have been his greatest adventure. He intended to sail a replica of a Phoenician ship from the Red Sea to the coast of North America. The Pacific Ocean crossing would have proven his theory that Ophir, the fabled site of King Solomon’s mines, was in the Americas. However, the ship burned to the waterline one night under mysterious circumstances.
Saxon believed that Ophir was not a single place but the code name for several sources of Solomon’s wealth. He theorized that Solomon launched two fleets under the direction of Hiram, the Phoenician admiral. One flotilla left from the Red Sea. The other flotilla crossed the Atlantic, after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar.
Saxon had found a strange glyph in a Peruvian ruin that matched similar symbols inscribed on tablets in Lebanon and Syria. He called the glyph the Tarshish symbol, and thought it might have been short-hand for “Ophir.” There were several photos of the glyph in his book.
Austin stared at the pictures.
The symbol was a horizontal line with back-to-back Zs at each end, identical to the mark carved into the Navigator’s kilt and the side of the bronze cat.
Saxon had exhausted every avenue of research on Solomon and Ophir. Then, in a chapter entitled “Epiphany,” he described how he’d hit upon the idea of searching for the Queen of Sheba. No one was closer to Solomon than Sheba. Maybe they shared pillow talk. His quest for Ophir took a backseat to the search for Sheba’s tomb.
Saxon had spent years and traveled thousands of miles in his quest for the Queen of Sheba. He had become infatuated with the dead queen. Saxon believed that Sheba was real, not a legend as some experts contended; that she was dark-skinned, and probably from the Yemen area. He recounted the legend of Solomon and Sheba. Curious about the stories she had heard about Solomon’s wisdom, she went to visit him. Their attraction for each other blossomed; they had a child. Eventually, she returned home, to tend to her own kingdom. Their son was thought to have become king of Ethiopia.
A dark-skinned beauty with links to Ethiopia, Austin mused. He glanced toward the stairs leading to the turret bedroom.
Austin finished the last chapter an hour later and put the book down. He checked the doors, turned off the lights, and quietly ascended the spiral staircase to the bedroom. He undressed, slid under the sheets without awakening Carina, put his arm protectively around her warm body, and quickly fell asleep.
CARINA’S VOICE woke him up early the next morning. She had brewed a pot of coffee and was on the phone making train reservations and arrangements with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After they showered, dressed, and had breakfast, Austin drove Carina to Union Station. She planted a kiss on his lips and said she would return to Washington that night. She would call him when the train left New York.
From Union Station, Austin drove to the NUMA tower. He took the elevator from the underground garage to the fifteenth floor, followed a corridor, and stepped through a doorway into a large, dimly lit space. A wide, curving wall was lined with glowing television screens that projected information collected by NUMASat.
The all-seeing system had gained it the nickname as the “Eye of Sauron” among the more literary-minded at NUMA. Jack Wilmut, the keeper of the eye, bore no resemblance to the fearsome creatures from a Tolkien saga. Wilmut was a mild-mannered man in his forties who supervised the NUMASat system from an elaborate console in the center of the room.
On both sides of the console were smaller computer workstations. Satellite interpreters fielded the dozens of queries that came in from scientists, universities, and ocean-related organizations from around the world.
Austin wondered why geniuses tended to be eccentric when it came to hair. Einstein. Beethoven. Mark Twain. Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor. NUMA’s bearded computer whiz, Hiram Yeager. Wilmut, a plumpish man in his forties, affected a double comb-over parted just above the ears.
Austin came up behind Wilmut and in his deepest voice said, “Greetings, O all-seeing Sauron.”
Wilmut spun around in his chair and grinned with delight.
“Greetings, Mortal. I was expecting you.”
“The Eye of Sauron sees all, knows all,” Austin said.
“Hell, no,” Wilmut replied. “I got your e-mail and pictures from Turkey. Pull up a seat and tell me how I can help.”
Austin plunked down in a swivel chair. “The photos show plaster casts made from the markings on an ancient statue. I think the squiggly lines are the contours of a map. Possibly a location on the East Coast. I wondered if the map could be compared to satellite photos.”
In answer, Wilmut clicked the computer mouse. The picture Austin had taken of the Navigator’s cat appeared within a rectangle. The image was sharper than on the original photo. “I’ve enhanced the picture,” Wilmut explained. “Got rid of the gray areas, fuzzy edges, and miscellaneous garbage. The borders help in the visualization.”
Austin tapped the screen with his forefinger. “This symbol may denote a sunken ship. The problem is, I don’t know if that square is one mile across. Or ten. Or even a hundred.”
“The image is similar to a fingerprint,” Wilmut said. “Prints are matched according to ridge characteristics called Galton details, points of identity or minutiae. You ID prints by comparing minutiae points. Ridge characteristics. Islands. Bifurcation. I’ve created an algorithm that will match the points on the primitive map with satellite photos. I’ll have the NUMASat computer look at each one of those possibilities. It will take a little while.”
Austin told Wilmut he would be in conference but to call when he had some news, and took the elevator down to another floor. He met Zavala in the hallway and they walked to the conference room together. The walls were hung with pictures of sailing ships. The centerpiece was a long oak conference table that seemed to float like a ship at sea on the thick blue carpet.
The Trouts sat at the table with a serious-faced young woman Austin assumed was Angela Worth. Angela was still in something of a state of shock. In the space of a few hours, she had met the Trouts, her boss had been murdered, and an attempt made on her life. She was still reeling from those events when she was drawn into the very heart of NUMA, an agency whose exploits she had only heard about.
Then the door opened, and the two men who came into the room could have stepped out of an adventure novel. The husky man with the piercing blue-green eyes and strange pale hair came over and introduced himself and his darkly handsome friend. She was practically speechless.
They sat at the table and Paul handed them copies of the computer-generated ship of Tarshish. “We think this is the type of vessel that would have sailed to North America. We didn’t get far on the transatlantic route, so we tried another avenue. We noticed a series of connections to the Philosophical Society and followed it up. That’s when we met Angela.”
“Congratulations on finding the Jefferson file,” Austin said with a friendly grin that put her at ease.
“Thank you,” Angela said. “It was dumb luck, really.”
“Angela has had more dumb luck,” Gamay said. “Please tell Kurt and Joe what else you’ve found.”
“We think that Meriwether Lewis was murdered to stop him from bringing some vital information t
o Thomas Jefferson.”
“I’d be interested in how you reached that conclusion,” Austin said.
Angela pulled a file folder out of a battered leather briefcase.
“I dug into the files looking for information on Lewis’s slave, a young man named Zeb. The records show that he arrived at Monticello several weeks after Lewis died. It’s possible he had gone along with a man called Neelly, who traveled to Monticello with news of Lewis’s death. Neelly would have needed help with Lewis’s belongings and brought along the slave. I wondered what became of Zeb after that.”
“In those days the slave would have been considered part of Lewis’s estate,” Austin said.
“That’s what I thought. He would have been delivered with other property to Lewis’s family. On a hunch, I went through Monticello’s slave population. I found something quite fascinating.”
She handed Austin a sheet of paper with the names of slaves, their sex, age, and job. Austin perused the roster and passed it along to the table without comment.
Gamay said, “Zeb is listed as a freeman. He was assigned to the house.”
“How did he become free at age eighteen?” Austin said.
“I think it was a reward,” Angela suggested.
“That makes sense,” Austin said. “It was Jefferson’s way of thanking the young man for a service he had performed.”
“The Lewis material,” Gamay said. “I’ll bet he delivered the goods to Jefferson.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” Austin asked Angela.
“He stayed at Monticello, working in a prize position inside the house. He vanished from the roster years later, but that’s not the end of the story.”
She produced a copy of an old newspaper clipping.
Gamay read the clipping. “Our freeman?”
“It says he worked for President Jefferson,” Angela said.
Gamay passed the clipping to Paul. “This is dynamite. He’s in his nineties, and was interviewed shortly before he died. On his deathbed, he says flat out that Meriwether Lewis was murdered.”