Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (9 page)

DeCorso fell to his knees and twisted his waist to look for the knife.

Where was it?

And then he saw it, slashing toward him from Cottle’s fist. The blade cut through his overcoat and got hung up in fabric long enough for DeCorso to get both hands on Cottle’s forearm and snap it down hard against his own knee.

Cottle’s primal yell made DeCorso lose control. Years of training and discipline suddenly washed away like a bridge knocked off its piers by floodwaters. The knife was in
his
hand now, and without a second of conscious thought, he leaned over and sliced the right side of the man’s already-bloody neck, cleanly severing the carotid artery, and collapsed backward to avoid the jets of blood.

DeCorso sat and watched, panting and fighting for air as Cottle bled out and died.

When he was able to compose himself, he took Cottle’s wallet and passport, and for show, rifled through his suitcase, scattering the contents. He found the paperwork with Piper’s address and pocketed it.

Then he left, still breathing hard.

The newspapers would carry the story for two days, before the metro reporters would lose interest. A young foreign businessman was the unfortunate victim of a violent hotel robbery.

Tragic, but these things happened in the big city.

Will would never even notice the story. He was preoccupied.

Back in London, alarms started going off after the normally reliable Cottle failed to make his second phone call. The Duty Officer got concerned enough to call Cottle’s mobile phone but got no response. It was the middle of the night, deep within the grand modern SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, where the lights perpetually burned brightly. Cottle’s SIS section chief finally had an assistant ring the Grand Hyatt to see if he’d checked in.

A desk clerk was dispatched to Cottle’s room, pounded on the door, and let himself into a hellish scene.

KENYON HAD THE BOOK. He was turning the pages with his long fingers, curled over it in a reverential posture. In all his years at Area 51, he had never had the luxury of holding one of the books without the harsh stares of a watcher jangling his nerves.

The three men were not making any noise, but Will was still unpleasantly surprised when the bedroom door opened.

Nancy was squinting at them in her robe.

“I’m sorry,” Will said. “I thought we were being quiet.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She looked at Spence on his scooter and Kenyon on the sofa with the open book on his lap.

Spence spoke up. “Mrs. Piper, I apologize for intruding. We’ll be leaving now.”

She moodily shook her head and disappeared into the bathroom.

Will looked guilty, a husband in trouble. At least Phillip wasn’t crying.

“Can you rewrap it, Alf? We should go,” Spence said.

Kenyon ignored him. He was absorbed. He was comparing the endpapers on the front and back covers, pressing down on them with the fleshy pulp of his fingers.

“There’s something wrong with the back cover,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen one like this.”

He carried it over to the scooter and put it on Spence’s lap. “Show me,” Spence demanded.

“It’s too thick. And it’s spongy. See?”

Spence pushed down on the back endpaper with his pointer finger. “You’re right. Will, do you have a sharp knife?”

“You want to cut it?” Kenyon asked.

“I just paid $300,000 for the privilege.”

Will had a beautiful little William Henry folding knife, sharp as a razor, a Christmas present from his daughter.

While he rummaged for it in the coffee-table drawer, Nancy came out of the bathroom and pierced him with a look as pointed as the knife blade before clicking the bedroom door shut.

Spence took the pocketknife and boldly cut an eight-inch slit through the edge of the endpaper. Then he inserted the blade, tented up the paper, and tried to get some light in. “I can’t see well enough. Do you have tweezers?”

Will sighed and went to the bathroom to get Nancy’s.

Spence stuck the tweezers through the slit, probing and clamping until something started to emerge. “There’s something in here!” He slowly pulled it through.

A folded piece of parchment.

The creamy sheet was surprisingly fresh and pliable, long protected from the light and the elements. He unfolded it once, twice.

It was written in a flowing archaic script, perfectly centered on the page, executed with care. “Alf. I don’t have my glasses. What is it?” He handed it to his friend.

Kenyon studied it, shaking his head in disbelief. He read it to himself, then muttered. “This is incredible.
Incredible.
”

“What?” Spence wheezed impatiently. “What!”

His friend’s eyes were moist. “It’s a poem, a sonnet actually. It’s dated 1581. It’s about the book, I’m sure of it.”

“Hell you say!” Spence exclaimed, too loud, making Will wince. “Read it to me.”

Kenyon read it out loud, his voice hushed but husky with emotion.

Fate’s Puzzle
When God did choose to show man’s fickle fate,
Throwing wide the doors to heaven and hell,
Wise souls did try to wipe and clean the slate,
Forsooth such secrets surely can’t be well:
’Tis best to tuck away and privy hide,
The puzzle pieces numbering one through four,
Lest foolish men awash in willful pride,
Pretend to comprehend and soak up more;
The first one bears Prometheus’s flickering flame,
The next does bless the gentle Flemish wind,
The third soars high above a prophet’s name,
The last, close by a son who darkly sinned;
When time doth come for humbled man to know,
Let’s pray God’s grace shan’t ebb but swiftly flow.
W. Sh.
1581

Kenyon was shaking with excitement. “W. Sh! Holy Christ!”

“This means something to you?” Will asked.

Kenyon could hardly speak. “Fellows, I think this was written by Shakespeare! William Shakespeare! Do either of you know what year he was born?”

They did not.

“Do you have a computer?”

Will found his laptop under a magazine.

Kenyon literally grabbed it from him to get online, then leapt onto a Googled Shakespeare site. His eyes danced over the first few paragraphs. “Born 1564. He’d be seventeen in 1581. Early life a mystery. Didn’t surface in London till 1585 as an actor. Stratford-upon-Avon’s in Warwickshire! That’s where Cantwell Hall is.” He returned to the parchment. “Forsooth such secrets surely can’t be well. It’s a pun! Can’t be well—Cantwell. Shakespeare was a big punster, you know. This is a puzzle poem. He’s writing about a series of clues, and I’m certain they’re about the origin of this book! They were hidden in Cantwell Hall, I’m sure of it, Henry!”

Spence’s jaw was slack. He turned up his oxygen flow a notch for fortification. “Goddamn it! I was right about this book—it
is
special! We’ve got to go there immediately.”

He said “we,” but he was staring directly at Will.

When DeCorso met him at the car, Frazier didn’t have to ask how it went. It was written all over his face in welts.

“What happened?”

“He was a pro.”

“Is that right?”

DeCorso touched his swollen lip. “He was a pro!” he said defensively.

“Did you get anything out of him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He put up a fight. It was him or me.”

Frazier shook his head. “For fuck’s sake.”

“I’m sorry.” He handed Frazier DeCorso’s papers.

Frazier examined the wallet. A license and credit card, some cash. His UK passport looked routine.

DeCorso was reliving the experience in his head. “The guy had commando training. I got lucky. It could’ve been me.”

“He was SIS.”

“When did you find that out?”

“A minute before you went in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I knew you’d be okay.”

DeCorso angrily folded his arms across his heaving chest and clammed up.

Frazier shook his head. Could a simple operation get more screwed up?

Frazier had been biding his time in the bar by composing a list. Now, he tossed it to DeCorso, who was looking shaky in the driver’s seat, parked at a curb a few blocks from the hotel. “Look up these DODs for me.”

“Who are they?”

“Will Piper’s family. All his relatives.”

DeCorso worked quietly, still seething and breathing hard.

In a few minutes, he said, “I just outputted it to your BlackBerry.”

The device chimed as he spoke. Frazier opened the email and studied the dates of death for everyone in the world who mattered to Will.

“At least
this
is good,” Frazier said. “This is very good.”

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Will slipped out of bed to get in a run before his family awoke. The sun was already so bright and inviting it shone like a golden sword through the gap between the bedroom curtains.

He turned on the coffeemaker and hypnotically watched the liquid drip through the filter into the pot, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t notice Nancy until she opened the fridge to get orange juice.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said quickly. “They got their book, and they left.”

She ignored him. That’s the way this was going to go.

He gamely pressed on. “The book was the real McCoy. It was incredible.”

She didn’t want to know about it.

“There was a poem hidden in the book. They think it was written by William Shakespeare.”

He could tell she was struggling to look disinterested.

“If you want to see it, I scanned it on the printer and left a copy in the top drawer of the desk.”

When she didn’t respond to that, he changed his tack and gave her a hug, but she kept her body unyielding, her juice glass in her outstretched hand. He let go, and said, “You’re not going to be happy about this either, but I’m going to England for a couple of days.”

“Will!”

He had the speech rehearsed. “I already called Moonflower this morning. She can give us all the time we need. Henry Spence is paying for it, plus he’s giving me a slug of cash, which we can definitely use. Besides, I’ve been itching for something to do. Be good for me, don’t you think?”

She was furious, pupils constricted, nostrils flared. She came out of her corner, throwing big hooks and crosses. “Do you have any idea how this makes me feel?” she fumed. “You’re putting us at risk! You’re putting Philly at risk! Do you honestly think these people in Nevada aren’t going to find out you’re fooling around in their sandbox?”

“I’m not going to be doing anything that bumps up against my agreements with them. Just a little research, try to answer a few questions for a dying man.”

“Who?”

“You saw him in his wheelie thing and oxygen. He knows his date. It’s in a week. He’d do the trip himself if he were healthy.”

She was unmoved. “I don’t want you to go.”

They stared at each other in a standoff. Then Philly started crying, and Nancy stomped away, literally stomping her feet on the kitchen tiles, leaving him alone with his black coffee and matching mood.

It infuriated Frazier that with the vast resources of the US government at their disposal, he had to double up in a hotel room because New York City hotel rates busted through their departmental per diems. It was a second-rate hotel, at that, with a grimy, squishy carpet harboring a lord-knows-what-brew of old emissions. Frazier was sprawled on his twin bed, drinking an awful cup of room-service coffee in his boxers. On the other bed, DeCorso was working away at his laptop, his head wrapped in a good pair of acoustic headphones.

His mobile phone rang and displayed Secretary Lester’s private line at the Pentagon. He felt his small intestine clench in involuntary spasm.

“Frazier, you’re not going to believe this,” Lester said with the controlled anger of a lifelong bureaucrat. “That Cottle guy worked for the Firm! He was SIS!”

“That’s what they get for spying on their friends,” Frazier said.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“That’s because I knew.”

“You knew? Before or after?”

“Before.”

“And you still had him killed? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I didn’t have him killed. He attacked my man. It was self-defense, and anyway, it was his day to die. If it weren’t us, it would have been a steak sandwich or a fall in the shower. He was dead anyway.”

Lester paused long enough for Frazier to wonder whether the call had dropped. “Jesus, Frazier, this stuff can make you crazy. You should have told me, anyway.”

“It’s on my head, not yours.”

“I appreciate that, but still, we’ve got a problem. The Brits are pissed.”

“Do we know what his mission was?”

“They’re being cagey,” Lester said. “They’ve always had a chip on their shoulder about Vectis, at least the old-timers.”

“Do they knew the book was from the Library?”

“Sure. There’s enough institutional memory within their MOD and Military Intelligence services for them to whisper Vectis whenever we come up with some crazy-ass, forward-looking scenarios—and then they come true! We’re getting it now on Helping Hand. They’re sure we know more about Caracas then we’re letting on, and, frankly, we’re sick of their questions and their griping. You and I know damn well the Brits would take the Library back in a heartbeat.”

“I’m sure they would.”

“They were fools to give it to us in 1947, but that’s ancient history.”

“What was their plan?”

“They embedded their man at the auction house to keep an eye on the book. They probably found out about it the same way we did, through an Internet filter. Maybe they were going to do a snatch and grab on you and hold us hostage. Who knows. They’ve got to know you’re from Groom Lake. When another buyer got it, they followed their noses to see where the trail led. They definitely wanted to get leverage on us, that much I’m sure.”

“What do you want me to do?” Frazier asked.

“Get the book back. And find out what that son of a bitch, Will Piper, is up to. Then immunize us. The Caracas Event is right around the corner, and I don’t need to tell you that anyone who’s involved in screwing up Helping Hand is as good as buried. I want to hear from you every few hours.”