Valhalla (17 page)

30 November
SB-18
U.S. Capitol
Washington, DC

When Jessica Birdwell's cell phone began vibrating on her belt clip, the deputy Homeland Security adviser was giving a top secret briefing to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in his hideaway office in the depths of the U.S. Capitol building.

“It's Ira Dusenberry, Senator,” she said. “I need to take the call.”

“Jess,” she said into the phone.

“Where are you?” Dusenberry demanded. “All hell has broken loose.”

“I'm up on the hill,” she said.

“So am I,” growled Dusenberry, “and Ad Kingship is on his way up here from the FBI building. Meet me in the senate majority leader's conference room as soon as you can get here.”

“Check,” she said, ending the call.

She apologized for having to cut the briefing short and headed upstairs through the labyrinth of underground corridors. Dusenberry and Kingship were waiting for her in the majority leader's office.

“Jim Langdon has been shot and killed,” said Dusenberry without any preliminaries.

“My God,” said Kingship.

“How did it . . . What . . . ?” blurted Jessica.

“Jim and a young FBI field agent from the Portland office flew up to Bangor to meet the plane carrying Macaulay and an archaeologist named Alexandra Vaughan,” said Dusenberry. “In response to Jim's request for a protective cordon, the county sheriff's office ringed the private aviation terminal with deputies. The four of them then went up to a conference room to get statements. From there on, it's all conjecture. Two hours after they went up, the senior deputy sheriff knocked on the door of the conference room and no one answered.”

“Why did it take him so long?” asked Jess.

“The private terminal had been shut down by a snowstorm and was deserted. Jim had told the deputy to wait until the statements were completed, which he said could take quite a while. When the deputy finally decided something might be wrong and entered the room, Jim and this agent, Gallagher, were lying dead on the floor. Macaulay and Vaughan were missing. We don't have ballistics yet, but it looks like Jim was shot twice with Gallagher's pistol and Gallagher was killed with Jim's gun.”

“That doesn't mean they fired the bullets,” said Kingship, his voice rising.

“No,” agreed Dusenberry.

“What else do we have?” asked Jess.

“A video camera was set up on the table to record their statements, but there was no disc drive in it,” said Dusenberry. “Also Jim's credentials and his iPad were missing. Whoever killed him presumably took them.”

“Who is handling the investigation at this point?” asked Jess.

“The bureau,” said Kingship. “We'll take it over as a national security matter, and our forensic team can be there in a couple hours. We should have a plausible reconstruction of what took place by tomorrow.”

“We need an immediate and comprehensive background check on Macaulay and the archaeologist,” said Jessica. “I know he's a retired air force brigadier, but he could be suffering from some post-traumatic stress condition; he could be psychopathic; he could be anything, including a mass murderer.”

“What motive would he have had to kill our agents?” asked Dusenberry. “He was seeking federal protection from the people who wiped out Hancock's team in Greenland.”

“All we have to go on so far is the story Macaulay told Mark Devlin at Anschutz in Dallas,” said Kingship. “What if it's all a lie?”

“So we can't rule out anything at this point,” said Dusenberry. “It's also possible that the people who did this somehow got word of Macaulay's and Vaughan's arrival in Bangor and went after them, killing Jim and the FBI agent in the process. Macaulay could be dead by now too.”

“There's one more piece of information that may be relevant to what we're dealing with,” said Kingship. “Our Boston office reported that early this morning a group of men armed with suppressed assault rifles entered an apartment house near Harvard Square in Cambridge and terrorized several of the residents. Their apparent target was a Harvard professor who lived on the top floor.”

“Half the street gangs in the country are armed with assault rifles and machine guns,” said Jessica.

“The professor was identified as an English expat named Barnaby Finchem, and he is apparently a leading authority on Viking archaeology. Alexandra Vaughan received her doctorate in Norse archaeology from Harvard.”

Dusenberry took it in.

“Where is Finchem now?” asked Jessica.

“None of the victims knows what happened to him. The armed men were inside less than ten minutes, just long enough to search his apartment and carry out a computer and several boxes of unidentified material.”

“Any description of the men?”

“They wore masks. According to one witness, two of the men had European accents.”

“That's a big help.”

“So . . . what does all this tell us?” said Dusenberry.

“One possibility is that they're kidnapping or murdering renowned archaeologists who have expertise in Norse history,” said Jessica, “which brings us back to what happened on the Greenland ice cap.”

“We have a team in place up there right now,” said Dusenberry. “They reached the coordinates supplied by Anschutz and have discovered traces of an encampment at the site. They're working in total darkness and have requested more staging equipment to broaden the search. I informed the president and he authorized me to do whatever it takes to locate Hancock and his party.”

“Here's another possibility,” said Kingship. “Macaulay and Vaughan escaped from whatever occurred up there in Bangor. Not knowing whom they could trust, they drove to Boston to seek refuge from her mentor, Finchem.”

“Or maybe they went to Boston to eliminate Finchem,” said Jessica.

“That's possible too,” agreed Dusenberry.

“It could be just a dispute over an archaeological discovery,” said Jessica. “I know John Lee Hancock was a friend of the president's, but that shouldn't trigger the same response as tracking down a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his suitcase.”

“Either way, we need to find them,” said Dusenberry. “Suggestions?”

Kingship scrolled down his iPad.

“I can put out an APB for both Macaulay and Vaughan as persons of interest to all the law enforcement agencies in New England,” he said. “The bureau can also compile a list of Macaulay's and Vaughan's family members, friends, and business associates in case they try to reach out to them. We'll also gather the data on their credit card records, cell phone numbers, and bank information.”

“If they're on the run, they're not likely to use their credit cards to help us track them,” said Jessica.

“Who knows where they'll slip up?” responded Kingship. “With all the surveillance technology at our disposal, it isn't easy to disappear these days.”

“As soon as we're finished here,” said Dusenberry, “I'll order the NSA to demand video from the TSA of every transit facility in New England for the last twenty-four hours, and then place NSA agents with the subjects' photographs in positions to monitor airports, concourses, train stations, and bus and metro terminals going forward. All those facilities are now equipped with cameras that provide sequential overlapping fields of vision. Incidentally, did anyone bother to ask for video from the Bangor private terminal or its parking lot? Unless the snow blotted out the coverage, we might be able to get the license plate number of the vehicle they used to leave the airport. Anything else?”

“If Macaulay and Vaughan have gone to ground in the Boston area, Finchem could be the key to their whereabouts,” said Kingship. I would recommend we identify and track all of his family, friends, and colleagues . . . all of his students too, or at least the current ones.”

“He probably has hundreds of them,” said Jessica. “That would shift an enormous amount of manpower from other priorities.”

“We have the manpower if you don't,” said Kingship, “and a lot of them are sitting on their ass. If nothing else, this will be good practice. Once we have the names, we'll monitor their cell phones, e-mails, Facebook postings, and everything else they do.”

“You're talking about hundreds of people who have no connection to this,” said Jessica. “What about First Amendment rights?”

“We're covered under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” said Dusenberry. “For our purposes, our three subjects of interest have triggered the tangibility requirement relevant to a terrorism investigation. Let's get going.”

30 November
The Long Wharf
Boston, Massachusetts

Barnaby flipped the switch that turned on a bank of television monitors in his computer lab. After inserting Falconer's memory card into the port of a digital reading device, he downloaded the material on the card onto two laptop computers on the console table.

Lexy sat down in front of one of them as he began projecting the photographs onto the seventy-two-inch flat-screen television monitor mounted above the table on the brick wall.

She had expected to see a succession of photographs of the Viking cave, but the first set of images consisted of a video sequence apparently filmed in a hotel room in which a red-headed woman was performing sex on the man holding the camera.

“Our late young Casanova, Dr. Falconer, I presume,” said Barnaby.

“Let's move on,” said Lexy.

The next set of images included still shots taken by Falconer aboard the helicopter on his way to the Greenland base camp. There were candid views of Sir Dorian and Hjalmar Jensen, followed by several of Hancock and Macaulay. The final series of shots began with a view of the ice-covered entrance to the deep cave.

“Here's what we're looking for,” said Lexy.

Falconer had filmed close-ups of the faces of all the Viking corpses, followed by shots of their equipment and clothing, and then more than a dozen photographs of the rune tablet from different angles.

“He obviously wanted to make sure he had it all,” said Barnaby.

To Macaulay, the crude rune markings looked like nothing but little stick figures intersected with horizontal dashes and circles. There were twelve separate lines of them, each one full of the incomprehensible symbols.

Barnaby joined Lexy at the console table in front of the television monitors and began furiously typing on his laptop. A moment later, the larger television monitor above them lit up with a brilliantly clear image of the complete text of the stonecutter's inscription.

Three smaller flat-screen television monitors were mounted beneath the big one. As Barnaby continued typing, a spate of English words began to appear on the small screen to the left.

“I'll use this one for my first take at a translation of each passage,” said Barnaby to Lexy. “You'll have the middle screen for your interpretation. Once we're agreed on the exact wording of a passage, we'll project the final cut onto the third screen.”

Macaulay looked on with fascination as they began trading thoughts on possible definitions and meanings for the first row of symbols. To Macaulay, they might as well have been hoofprints around a muddy water hole in west Texas.

“Definitely early eleventh century,” said Barnaby. “The ancient futhork with a few added wrinkles.”

“Wrinkles?” asked Macaulay.

“Each early stonecutter had his own personal style, unique to his training and experience,” said Barnaby, “just like the early telegraphers when they were mastering the Morse code.”

“These first lines are his impressions of Vinland,” said Lexy.

“Agreed,” said Barnaby as they both continued typing their translations.

The wild beasts feared us
were the first words to make it to the third screen.

“Why would he have written that?” asked Macaulay.

“It means that the animals in Vinland had already been hunted and were afraid of man,” said Barnaby, “which means that other hunters had already been there. In Greenland, wild animals were unafraid when the Norsemen first arrived. Until recently, that same phenomenon was true in the Galápagos.”

Every few minutes, Lexy or Barnaby would get up from the computer console to go over to his library to consult one of the vellum manuscripts on the big walnut refectory table.

“He begins the saga of the voyage home on the third line,” said Barnaby after about half an hour.

We have come through the tempest
and survived,
wrote Barnaby on his screen.

“Not quite,” said Lexy. “
Tempest
is from Vulgar Latin
tempesta
, an alteration of the Latin
tempestas
, season. It's thirteenth century.”

We have come through the storm and survived,
wrote Lexy on her screen.

“Agreed,” said Barnaby.

Seas like mountains . . . hull damaged
, next made it to the final screen, followed by
landed small island.

Klief,
wrote Lexy at that point.

“Old Norse,” agreed Barnaby. “A rugged shoreline with cliffs.”

Macaulay was watching both screens when he felt the floor beneath his feet begin to tremble, and a thunderous noise penetrated the thick fortresslike outer walls of the building.

“A helicopter,” said Macaulay, “flying very low along the wharf.”

“What time is it?” asked Barnaby.

Macaulay gave him the time.

“Could be anything from our erstwhile mayor giving a tour to prospective Chinese hotel developers to a TV news helicopter,” said Barnaby.

“It could also be our friends,” said Macaulay as the clamorous din ebbed away.

We battled a strange being of great force and strength,
Lexy wrote on her screen.

“I would almost say that
strange
translates to
alien being
,” she added.

“Perhaps,” came back Barnaby.

“It's definitely something that none of them had ever seen before,” said Lexy.

“An extraterrestrial?” suggested Macaulay.

Barnaby gave him a look of derision.

“A being different in its fundamental nature of immense force and strength,” he said. “Perhaps a large wild quadruped.”

Leifr lies in the hallowed place with his vanquished,
wrote Lexy next.

“A grizzly bear?” offered Macaulay.

“Why don't you make yourself useful in the kitchen?” said Barnaby. “There is a large stoneware tureen of coq au vin I've already prepared in the kitchen. And decant two of the bottles of Banfi Centine you'll find in the wine closet.”

“By your command, my liege,” said Macaulay with an exaggerated bow before heading toward the kitchen.

“You told me he's a retired general,” said Barnaby in his clipped English accent. “Now I see why.”