The Overseer (23 page)

Moving down the hall, he arrived at the second door on the left. Placing a finger to the glass, he watched as the room opened up in front of him. Three neat columns of shelves, along with the ceiling-high wall brackets, housed several hundred books, some the recent beneficiaries of
long-needed
care, others crumbling toward a slow and painless death. A sense of home. Of place. As ever, the little sun that managed its way into the room bobbed atop his old desk, the light from outside caught in the trees as it cascaded through the window. Books everywhere, yet all he could see were the alcove, the desk, the chair. And for a moment, caught by the flickering light, he was back, sitting, her small hands gliding over his shoulders to his chest, her cheek sliding by his.

His head flinched, the room suddenly darker, airless. She was not there. No soft caress, no scent of lilac to dispel the longing. Xander stared into the open space and slowly moved toward the alcove. He began to trace his
finger
along the hard edge of the wooden chair. Two years. He had lost two years of his life after Fiona. Not in the usual sense. There had been no
wandering
off, no extended holiday lost in self-pity. Instead, he had given
himself
entirely to his work. Machiavelli had once again taken focus, only to become his springboard to the New Right. A sudden obsession. He hadn’t bothered to ask why. It was enough to be distracted. Even Lundsdorf had approved.
Ironic
, he thought. Tieg and Sedgewick. They had brought him full circle, back to the Institute, back to the alcove.

The fluorescent lights flicked on and Xander spun around, his eyes momentarily at odds with the sudden change.

“Sorry. I did not mean to startle you.” A small man nodded in Xander’s direction, his eyes darting about the room before settling on a shelf along the far wall. Xander watched him sidle along, thumbing his way down the long row of books, every so often stopping, humming before moving on. The pattern continued for several minutes until, with a long “Aah,” he pulled the sought-after volume from the shelf and rested it on a nearby table. Examining a few pages, the man seemed so typical of the place—the weathered jacket, the slight hunch in the shoulders, the utter disregard for anything and anyone within a hundred feet. Save for the slicked-back hair. That seemed an odd touch, a hint of vanity unusual within the hallowed halls. The man looked up and caught Xander’s eyes. There was nothing kind in the stare, nothing of the cheerful nod hello. And then suddenly a smile. Thin lips curling through sunken cheeks.

“It is not what I am looking for,” he said, his accent northern European. Dutch, Swiss, German—Xander couldn’t tell.

“Pity.”

“Yes.” He shut the book and placed it on the shelf. He then ran a hand through his hair. “Wrong room, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Again, they stared at each other, the man’s eyes empty of all response. “Sorry to have disturbed you.” He moved to the door, turned for a final nod, and then stepped into the hallway. The door closed behind him.

Xander’s hands were trembling as the sound of the footsteps receded, a reaction, he knew, driven less by the man’s appearance than by the place itself. He had allowed himself an indulgence. It was something he knew Sarah would never have permitted.

On the steps down to the main floor, his mind was already turning over the pieces of information he had begun to decipher from Carlo’s notes. A brisk wind greeted him as he picked up his pace through the colonnade, its rush providing a much needed shock to his system.
Lock it away; leave it up in that room.
The numbness returned, all too familiar, all too reminiscent of the same distance he had seen only yesterday—in Sarah, in her eyes.

C
HICAGO
, M
ARCH
4, 5:14
A.M
.
Janet Grant clamped the man’s lifeless fingers around the gun, positioning his hand on the pillow as she had been told. She had never taken a life on her own, the deaths in
Washington
rationalized as something beyond her control. This morning’s
activities,
however, could not be so easily dismissed. The old man had called it “her penance.” For Eggart.

She scanned the room, the computer still purring away, screen after screen of files melting away to oblivion. She had not been told why it was necessary to erase everything; it was not her place to know.

She sat in a chair and waited, staring at Chapmann’s lifeless corpse on the bed. An apparent suicide. A man who had questioned the process.

It was a lesson Janet Grant would not soon forget.

 

Sarah had flown in late from London the night before, but by 6:45
A.M
., she had already had a very productive morning. Finding her old friend Tommy Carlisle—head of the Criminal Division at Justice—at the Old Ebbitt Grill had been easy. The 6:00 breakfast of kippers and strong black coffee—made ready at so early an hour for the Grill’s
special
clientele—was a part of his daily routine. As was his perfectly tailored suit and crisp bow tie, famous among certain Washington circles. He had been the obvious choice, given what she was after.

“I need to see some files,” she began.

“And naturally, you’ve got clearance from State.”

Sarah smiled. “Tommy … I said it was a favor, not business.”

He paused, then nodded. “I see. And what kind of files would they be?”

“Old ones.”

“How old?”

“The type they don’t put on the computers.” Now she waited. “The ones stored in D-five.”

His eyes showed a moments reaction. “D-five,” his own smile distinctly strained. “And how would you know about that?”

Sarah said nothing, her eyes on his.

After a few seconds, he began to shake his head. “Sorry, dear. That’s slightly out of
favor
jurisdiction. Not to mention the mess this past week; security’s been punched up everywhere around town. We’re all being rather cautious.”

“I won’t take a thing, Tommy, I promise. All I need is a level-seven—”

“I don’t think we’re having this conversation.”

“You’ve got the clearance, don’t you?” She waited, studying his face. She then spoke very deliberately. “You’ve got it on you right now.”

  Their long hug good-bye had given her ample opportunity to lift his ID from his pocket and replace it with a well-crafted fake. With Tommy out of town for a few days—her source of information on Carlisle had been top-notch, worth at least another thousand—she’d known he’d have no reason to use it, no way to discover the forgery. That she was about to breach the State Secrets Act was another matter. The boys at Justice would no doubt want an explanation; she was banking on the aftermath of Eisenreich’s
first trial
to keep them busy for a time. At some point, though, she knew they’d be sending out a few friends to …
convince
her to come in and chat. It would make things a bit more complicated, but it was a risk worth taking.

Now, she stood outside a nondescript door, one of only two along an isolated corridor tucked deep within subbasement four at Justice. The plaque on the glass read
D-FIVE
. Thus far, Carlisle’s card had maneuvered her through three separate checkpoints, each manned by a marine in full uniform. Recent additions. She had not bothered to ask. None of the young men had said a word, relying on various scanners to confirm her clearance. She had known before coming just how lucky she was; Justice remained a little behind the times—no retina scans as yet. Then again, she couldn’t imagine who else would want to see the files on Tempsten, or, more to the point, who would have taken the time to track them this far. Sensitive, but outdated. That’s what Tommy had said. Evidently, the
combination
was making her visit possible.

She placed the card on the unmanned scanner; six seconds later, the door clicked open, and Sarah stepped through, nearly bumping into a shelf no more than two feet from the door. Fluorescent lights immediately came on overhead, revealing D-five as nothing more than a very long hallway, files piled deep in ceiling-high shelves along the entire length of the
corridor
. She closed the door and noticed a small chart affixed to the near wall, arrows and boxes designating different years for every shelf. Nineteen
sixty-nine
stood three from the end.

It took her less than five minutes to locate the two thin folders on
Tempsten
, each filled with no more than five or six sheets, some of them
handwritten
, others hastily typed, smudge marks in evidence throughout the files. It was clear that no one had taken a look at them in a very long time.

The explanation for their placement in D-five was summed up in a few short sentences at the bottom of the first page. Sarah read:

It was the next few lines, however, that put the commission’s apparent
concern
into proper perspective.

Monitoring in the guise of caring. A classic ploy. The rest of the file was a detailed rundown of the events that had taken place in 1969.

Sarah flipped through to the next pages. Whatever they had meant to include had obviously not made it to the files—nothing that might explain why the children had been there in the first place, or what might have triggered the violence. Instead, the file simply detailed the events of the next few weeks, the subsequent hospitalization of the children, and the attempt to track down Anton Votapek, whose name had appeared on several of the documents they had recovered. Failure to find Votapek had left the commission no choice but to label its efforts “a continuing
investigation
.” The last page was dated January 9, 1970, various signatures underneath.

Sarah quickly turned to the second folder. Opening it, she was greeted by a list of fourteen names, ages, and phone numbers. The children at
Tempsten
. She read the list. She was about to flip to the next page when her eyes froze on a name three from the bottom. For a moment, she stared at the
letters
, not quite sure what she was reading.
That’s not possible,
she thought. At first, she wanted to explain it away as some bizarre coincidence—it was, after all, a common-enough name—but her instinct knew better. She had found the name
here
, locked underneath seven levels of clearance, a place she was never meant to see. That she had no idea
why
his name had appeared
mattered
very little. She had found it, and that, somehow, was confirmation enough. It
was
him. The name, the age.