Tales From the Black Chamber (7 page)

Hunter turned on the headlights, as dusk was turning to night, started the engine, then reached into a glove compartment and handed Anne a small, very heavy box. “Could you hand that to Mr. Ashton please, Ms. Wilkinson?”

“Sure.” She did so, noticing in the process that it had the Winchester company's logo on it and .45
GAP
just below that.

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“You're welcome.”

They drove in silence as John began laboriously loading each of the four empty magazines from his pockets with ten rounds of ammunition and topping off the one in his pistol with nine more.

Eventually, watching them cross the American Legion Bridge into Maryland, Anne said, “Okay, am I allowed to ask where we're going?”

“We have a nice safe house in Maryland where you'll be able to look more at the book,” said Agent Hunter.

“Oh my God, that's the last thing I want to do right now. I can't even think straight, and you want me to do paleography?! In freaking
Latin
?!” Her voice began to crack, so she shut up quickly.

“Ma'am, that may be the one way we're going to get onto these guys at this point.”

John put his hand on hers, and she instinctively yanked hers away. “Anne, look, this is the best way to keep you safe, and maybe we can get back to our mystery.”

“Mystery?! Nancy Drew never got shot at with fucking
machine guns.
One minute, we're looking at a rare book, the next minute it's the fucking
Bourne Identity
. Only you're no Matt fucking Damon.” She saw Hunter crack a sardonic half smile. “No offense, John. I mean, well, sure, take offense. I don't know anymore.” She shrank into a corner, arms crossed, glowering fiercely at the Beltway traffic out the front window.

Neither of the men seemed inclined to essay conversation after that, so Anne sat in furious stillness as they got off the Beltway at Connecticut Avenue and drove into a suburb just off Rock Creek Park. They drove through a neighborhood until they got to the last street before a ravine, on the other side of which rose the Mormon Temple, an Emerald City in luminous white, surmounted by orange spires on the top of one of which stood the Angel Moroni, his trumpet at the ready for the end of the world.

At the L-shaped intersection of two streets sat a house behind a wall and a long, gated driveway. Agent Hunter took a garage-door opener out of the glove compartment, flipped it open like an old cell phone and entered a code on a keypad. The gate slid open quickly and silently, and the SUV rolled past.

Anne saw the outline of a two-story house in the headlights. Hunter opened the garage door and parked the SUV next to a Camry. After he'd closed the door behind them, he unlocked the doors. Anne made no move to get out.

“Anne, look,” pleaded John. “Give Agent Hunter the manuscript box. He'll sit on it here, and we'll take the other car out to a mall and buy you some clothes and toiletries. On me. Heck, I'll buy you dinner. Or give me your sizes, and I'll go. You can shower and take a nap and I'll bring something back. Or you can take the car. It's got a GPS navigation thingy. You're not a prisoner.”

Anne exhaled and leveled her gaze at him. “Look, you. None of those sound appealing
at all
. I want to be back in my apartment in New York watching TV with no one trying to kill me. Or on my parents' couch in Albuquerque. The last place I want to be is this dump with you two. But. I am hungry, and I'm not taking a shower until I have clean clothes to change into. So, let's go, you and I. We'll shop. We'll eat. What we won't do is chat. In fact, I don't think I'd like you to speak unless spoken to. Are we clear?”

“Pellucid,” he said solemnly. She had to fight hard not to show a little amusement at the baroque vocabulary. From Nancy Drew to
The Bourne Identity
—what fresh hell was this, Wodehouse?

She turned to Agent Hunter, who was again smiling his ironic little smile, enjoying Ashton's dressing-down. She picked up the heavy manuscript box and lifted it over the seat, setting it down on the long guns. “Agent Hunter, here's the book.” Her lips curled into a vicious little smile of her own. “So that you aren't bored in our absence, by the time we get back, you will have all these pages in numerical order according to the file name printed on each page's bottom corner, and you will carefully document all the missing pages on a notepad in legible script.”

Hunter scowled and opened his mouth when John patted him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, thanks, Agent Hunter,” and slid out of the SUV.

5

They'd spent a good hour or more walking around White Flint, an expensive mall on Rockville Pike a few miles from the safe house. John did a good impression of a deaf-mute servant. He stayed a pace behind her, and dutifully tendered the Foundation's Amex card at each cash register. Anne still felt a bit vindictive, so she made sure all her purchases were expensive, including a pair of earrings with a tangle of sterling stems ending in little diamond buds, an original design from the Khoury Bros. store near the foot of the escalator to Borders, her last stop. She picked up what few reference volumes they had on Latin, Renaissance magic, and cryptography. Actually, the last were plentiful, which confused Anne a little until she remembered that the National Security Agency was somewhere around Washington.

Done at last, she turned to John and said, “Okay, I'm ready to be wined and dined. Take me somewhere nice.”

“You like French?”

“I do.”

“After you.”

La Miche, a country-French restaurant in Bethesda, was not far. When they arrived Anne said, “
La Miche? Comme ça?
” and put her hand on her rear end.

“Um, I thought it meant ‘loaf of bread,'” John said, a tad abashed.

“It does. A round loaf. Which is why it's slang for ‘buttock.' Where'd you learn French?”

“My German's better,” John truckled.

Not willing to let him off the hook, she said, “Well, let's hope it doesn't taste like ass.”

Quite the contrary, she found out. She happily ordered for both of them. Baked brie and white sturgeon caviar to start, goat cheese
salade maison
, and
filet mignon au poivre et bourbon
for her and
cuisse de canard Grand-mère
for him. As she placed the order she said, “We'd also like the soufflé. But no hurry.”

Seeing John wince a little, thinking about what must already be the mother of all expense reports, she waited until the waiter was gone, took a sip of wine, and said, “I hope they don't rush the soufflé. Agent Hunter's going to need a
lot
of time.”

John actually spat out a little of the water he'd been drinking. He looked at her, and saw her laughing eyes and let himself laugh. Soon she was laughing too. Finally, she drained the glass of wine, signaled for him to refill it, and said, “Okay, John. Look, I'll level with you. This is all a little too much. But you seemed—seem—like a really decent guy. Can you explain any of this to me?”

“I'll try. What do you want to know?”

“Well, for starters, who do you work for? Don't say the Coolidge Foundation. I got that. Even if that's technically true, there's no way some little library foundation has its employees packing heat. ‘My name is Decimal, Dewey Decimal. Double-O 813.54.'”

John laughed out loud. Anne continued, “Also, you were able to pull strings with the FBI to get us on a plane and have Agent Hunter show up at the airport with an arsenal and drive us to a safe house. That strikes me as
very
unusual for a ‘historian.'” She sat back in her chair.

“Okay, well, let's see. God's honest truth.” He held up a hand as if swearing an oath. “I do work for the Coolidge Foundation, and they do make me carry a gun for reasons I can't go into but aren't unrelated to the kind of unpleasant scene we had today. I do not work for the CIA, DIA, DEA, FBI, ATF, Secret Service, NSA, NIS, or, um, Scotland Yard. I called Agent Hunter and asked him to help, because he'd spoken to both of us about Mildred's death.”

“So why does he call you John, John?”

“Okay, ok, you got me. I've worked with him before. A few years ago, we had some instances of interstate fraud involving some books we thought we were acquiring. He was the Special Agent in Charge. So we're friendly. He's really not that bad, even though he's a little by-the-book.”

“He seemed to enjoy my ripping into you a lot.”

“He has a sense of humor. It's just, well, it's just hidden behind the whole G-Man persona.”

“Well, we're definitely staying out late to make him get the book back in order.”

“Oh, definitely. How's the caviar?”

“Extraordinary. Pass the brie, please.”

When they returned to the house, which proved to be a conventional, spacious, pleasantly furnished suburban residence, they found Agent Hunter in the basement, surrounded by stacks of thin white foam board and aluminum tubes. He was thumbtacking a page to a piece of foam board that already had four or five attached neatly, though spaced seemingly at random.

“Steve,” said John.

“John. Ms. Wilkinson.”

“Can I ask what this art project is?” said John, slightly sarcastically.

“No,” replied Hunter.

Anne stared at all the oddities. “You're organizing all the pages to be displayed on the foam board. I'm guessing ten to a side, twenty to a board. So all the pages have a pre-ordained place, and you can view them ten at a time.”

Hunter looked up, his face still deadpan, but when he spoke, appreciation was audible. “That's it exactly.”

“That's very clever,” said Anne. “But what are all these aluminum pieces?”

“Frame,” Hunter explained. “When it's put together, you'll be able to flip the boards left and right like pages in a book.”

“Oh,” said John, with sudden understanding. “Like a poster rack in a store.”

Hunter just nodded.

“This is great. Brilliant even, Agent Hunter. Thank you,” gushed Anne.

“Don't let his monosyllabic grunts and lack of social graces fool you, Anne,” said John. “Agent Hunter here is a former Navy SEAL. His IQ is probably 140 or so.”

Hunter scowled at John. “I don't think we should get too familiar here, John.”

“Fine, fine.” John accepted the reproof with obvious annoyance. “You just cost yourself an assistant.” He turned and headed back up the stairs.

“I'll stay,” offered Anne.

“Thanks anyway, Ms. Wilkinson. I do better work alone. Go get some rest. You've had a terrible day.”

“Are you sure, Agent Hunter? I'm feeling much better with some food in me.”

He shook his head. “Really, I'll be fine. You'll have this upstairs by breakfast. It'll have casters, so you can move it from room to room.”

“You're sure?”

“Good night, Ms. Wilkinson.”

Anne went upstairs to the master bedroom, showered, and collapsed into a black, dreamless sleep. When she came downstairs the next morning around ten-thirty in a pair of jeans and a red cashmere sweater, he'd been as good as his word. The display looked like something a museum curator might have in his workroom.

John was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and working through the
Post
and
Times
. He looked up from a sports page. “Hey, Caps won last night. Ovechkin had two.”

Anne furrowed her brow. “That would be … baseball?”

“Close, hockey.”

“Sorry, I don't really do sports. Nothing against them, but I've been a bit career-minded, so that was a whole hunk of life I decided I could ignore. I'll still watch a football game if the Broncos are playing. But hockey? I think the last game I paid attention to was an Albuquerque Scorpions game when I was home for Christmas in college one year.”

“
Nekulturnaya
.”

“Ha!” she laughed. “You speak Russian?”

“A little. I take it you do.”

“Yeah, I took a couple years in college. I was a bit of a Dostoyevsky freak.”

“I'm a little worried that our current predicament owes a little to
Besy.
”

“Demons
?” she asked, referring to the great novella.

“Hi, John. What are we talking about?” came a loud voice from behind Anne. She jumped. Agent Hunter stood behind her, scowling at John, with the M16 slung over his shoulder.

John looked down at his newspaper. “Russian literature.”

“Really? Enlighten me,” said Hunter. “
War and Peace
didn't fit in my pocket in Afghanistan.”

Anne stepped in. “John was saying that our problems reminded him of the Dostoyevsky novel
Besy
, which used to be called
The Possessed
and is now usually called
Demons
or
The Devils
or something like it. It's about a bunch of political fanatics—terrorists, really.”