The Alexandria Link

 

TWENTY-NINE

LONDON

7:30 PM

MALONE WATCHED PAM SLEEP. HE WAS SLOUCHED IN A CHAIR beside the hotel room's window, George Haddad's satchel lying in his lap. He'd been right about the disinfectant: Pam had bitten hard on the towel as he'd doused the wound. Tears had welled in her eyes, but she'd been tough. Not a sound betrayed her agony. Feeling bad for her, he'd bought her a new shirt from the lobby boutique.

He was tired, too, but his "Billet nerves," as he called them, supplied his muscles with boundless energy. He could recall times when days had passed without eating, his body charged with adrenaline, his focus on staying alive and getting the job done. He'd thought that rush a thing of the past. Something he'd never experience again.

And here he was.

Right in the middle.

The past few hours could have been a gruesome nightmare except that, in undreamlike fashion, the events played clear in his mind. His friend George Haddad had been shot right before his eyes. People with agendas were after something. All none of his business any other time. But some of those same people had kidnapped his son and blown up his bookshop. No. This was personal.

He owed them.

And like Haddad, he intended to pay his debts.

But he needed to know more.

Haddad had been cryptic in his comments both before and after the Israelis appeared. Even worse, he'd never finished explaining what he'd noticed years ago-what exactly motivated Israel to kill him. Hoping that the leather satchel lying in his lap contained answers, he unbuckled the clasps and removed a book, three notebooks, and four maps.

The book was an eighteenth-century volume, the cover tooled leather and brittle like sun-dried skin. None of its lettering was legible, so he carefully parted the binding and read the title sheet.

A Hero's Journey by Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius.

He scanned the pages.

A novel written more than two hundred years ago in an unimaginative and pedantic style. He wondered about its significance and hoped the notebooks would explain.

He thumbed through each one.

The tight script was Haddad's, written in English. He read closer.

...the clues left with me by the Guardian have proven troubling. The hero's quest is difficult. I'm afraid I've been the fool. But not the first. Thomas Bainbridge was also a foolish man. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, he apparently was extended an invitation to the library and completed the hero's quest. A condition of the invitation must surely be that the visit stay private. The Guardians have not spent two millennia protecting their cache only to have it revealed by an invitee. But Bainbridge violated that trust and wrote of his experience. In an effort to ease his treachery, he couched his tale as fiction titled not so curiously, A Hero's Journey. The book was printed in limited copies and hardly noticed. In Bainbridge's day, the world was teeming with fantastic tales (novels regarded with little respect), so the protagonist's journey to some mythical library was viewed with little enthusiasm. I found a copy three years ago, which I stole from a Welsh estate. Reading it offers little insight. Bainbridge, though, could not resist one final violation of the trust the Guardians placed in him. In the years before he died he erected an arbor in the garden of his Oxfordshire mansion. Into the marble he carved the image of a painting and Roman letters. The painting, by Nicolas Poussin, was originally known as Happiness Subdued by Death but its more common name today is The Shepherds of Arcadia II.

Malone knew little of Poussin, though he was familiar with the name. Luckily, in one of the notebooks, Haddad provided some details.

Poussin was a troubled soul, much like Bainbridge. He was born in Normandy in 1594, and the first thirty years of his life were ones of trials and tribulations. He suffered a lack of patrons, unappreciative courtesans, poor health, and debt. Even working on the ceiling in the Grand Gallery at the Louvre left him uninspired. Not until Poussin left France for Italy in 1642 did a change occur. That journey, which normally would have been one of a few weeks, took Poussin nearly six months. Once in Rome, Poussin began to paint with a new style and confidence, one that did not go unnoticed, one that quickly earned him the label as the most celebrated artist in Rome. Many have speculated that somewhere along his journey Poussin was inducted into a great secret. Interestingly, when The Shepherds of Arcadia was finished, the patron who commissioned the piece, Cardinal Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX, chose not to hang the work in public, but kept it in his private apartment. Rospigliosi was an artistic man with an interest in the arcane and esoteric. He possessed an outstanding personal library, and historians eventually labeled him "the freethinking pope."

A clue as to what Poussin may have personally experienced can be found in a letter written six years after The Shepherds of Arcadia was completed. Its drafter, a priest, the brother of Louis XIV's finance minister, thought what he'd learned from Poussin might be of interest to the French monarchy. I found the letter a few years ago among the archives of the Cosse-Brissac family:

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail-things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.

Quite a statement-and puzzling, too. But what Bainbridge erected in his garden is even more puzzling. After completing The Shepherds of Arcadia, for some inexplicable reason, Poussin painted its reverse image in what has been labeled The Shepherds of Arcadia II. This is what Thomas Bainbridge chose for his marble bas-relief. Not the original, but its counter part. Bainbridge was clever, and for two hundred years his monument, ripe with symbolism, stood in obscurity.

Malone read on, his mind lost in a maze of possibilities. Unfortunately, Haddad did not reveal much more. The remainder of the notes dealt with the Old Testament, its translations, and its narrative inconsistencies. Not a word about what Haddad may have noticed that had generated so much interest. Nor was there any message from a Guardian. No details of any hero's quest, only a fleeting reference at the end of one of the notebooks.

In the drawing room of Bainbridge Hall is more of Bainbridge's arrogance. Its title is particularly reflective. The Epiphany of St. Jerome. Fascinating and fitting, as great quests often begin with an epiphany.

A bit more flesh to the bones, but still a lot of unanswered questions. And he'd learned that wrestling with questions that possessed no answers was the fastest way to immobilize the brain.

"What are you reading?"

He glanced up. Pam was still lying in the bed, head on the pillow, eyes open.

"What George left."

She slowly sat up, cleared the sleep from her eyes, and checked her watch. "How long have I been out?"

"An hour or so. How's the shoulder?"

"Sore."

"It will be for a few days."

She stretched her legs. "How many times were you shot, Cotton? Three?"

He nodded. "You don't forget any of them."

"Neither did I. If you recall, I took care of you."

She had.

"I loved you," she said. "I know you may not believe that. But I did."

"You should have told me about Gary."

"You hurt me with what you did. I never understood why you had to screw around on me. Why I wasn't enough."

"I was young. Stupid. Full of myself. It was twenty years ago, for God's sake. And after, I was sorry. I tried to be a good husband. I really did."

"How many women were there? You never said."

He wasn't going to lie. "Four. One-night stands, every one of them." Now he wanted to know. "And you?"

"Just one. But I saw him for several months."

That stung. "You loved him?"

"As much as a married woman could love somebody other than her husband."

He saw her point.

"Gary came from that." She seemed to be wrestling with a question mark that kept appearing from her past. "When I look at Gary a part of me is sometimes angry for what I did-God help me-but a part of me is grateful, too. Gary was always there. You came and went."

"I loved you, Pam. I wanted to be your husband. I was really sorry for what I did."

"It wasn't enough," she muttered, eyes to the floor. "I didn't know it at the time, but I came to realize that it would never be enough. That's why we stayed separated five years before we divorced. I wanted our marriage, but then again I didn't."

"You hated me that bad?"

"No. I hated myself, for what I did. It's taken me years to come to that realization. Take it from one who knows, a person who hates herself is in a lot of trouble. She just doesn't know it."

"Why didn't you tell me about Gary when it happened?"

"You didn't deserve the truth. At least, that's what I thought. Only in the past year have I realized the mistake. You screwed around, I screwed around, but I got pregnant. You're right. I should have told you way back. But that's maturity talking and, like you said, we were both young and stupid."

She went silent. He did not intrude.

"That's why I stay angry at you, Cotton. Can't cuss myself out. But it's also why I finally told you about Gary. You do realize that I didn't have to say a word and you would have never known a thing? But I wanted to make it right. I wanted to make peace with you-"

"And with yourself."

She slowly nodded. "Most of all." Her voice broke.

"Why'd you come after me at Haddad's? You knew there'd be shooting."

"Let's just say it was another foolish move."

But he knew better. Time to tell her the truth. "You can't go home to Atlanta. A man was following you in the airport. That's why I came back."

Her face was fixed in a brooding stare. "You should have told me."

"Yeah, I should have."

"Why would someone be following me?"

"Getting ready for another opportunity. Maybe a loose end that needed tying up."

He saw she understood his meaning.

"They want to kill me?"

He shrugged. "I have no idea. That's the problem. We're guessing."

She lay back down on the bed, apparently too tired, sore, and bewildered to argue. "What are you going to do? Haddad's dead. The Israelis should go away."

"Which gives us an open-field run to find whatever it is George was looking for. That hero's quest. He left this stuff on purpose. He wanted us to go."

She settled her head on the pillow. "No. He wanted you to go."

He saw her wince in pain. "Let me get you some ice for that shoulder. It'll help."

"I won't argue with you."

He stood, grabbed the empty bucket, and headed for the door.

"I would like to know what's worth dying for," she said.

He stopped. "You'd be surprised how little it can be."

"I think I'll call Gary while you're gone," she said. "I want to make sure he's okay."

"Tell him I miss him."

"He's okay there?"

"Henrik will take good care of him. No worries."

"So where are we going to start looking?"

Good question. But then, as he stared across the room at the contents of the satchel, he knew there was only one answer.

THIRTY

LONDON

9:00 PM

SABRE STARED OUT THE WINDOW INTO THE NIGHT. HIS OPERATIVE, who'd been waiting at Heathrow Airport for Malone to arrive, had followed the ex-agent to this apartment, which sat on a solid block of gabled buildings that surely coddled neat lives, good order, and careful privacy.

Typical British.

His operative had also heard shots from inside the building and watched a shootout ensue between Malone and another man-Malone's ex-wife nicked by one of the bullets. The assailant had then fled, and Malone and his ex-wife had returned inside before leaving with a leather satchel.

That had been hours ago, and he hadn't heard from his operative since. Of course he'd been on a flight from Cologne to London most of that time, but still, she should have reported something by now.

He was tired, but energized, as his goal crept ever closer.

He'd easily gained entrance to George Haddad's apartment, wondering if Haddad would be there, but no one had been inside. Maps dotted the walls. With his penlight he'd examined the odd assortment, but the locations-the Middle East-were not surprising. Many of the books and sheaves of ill-arranged papers were likewise on the subject of the day.

The Library of Alexandria.

For the past hour he'd studied the material within the pale penumbra of his penlight. He wondered about Haddad's fate. The man whom Cotton Malone had challenged on the street was surely Israeli. Jonah had made clear in Rothenburg that an assassination squad was headed to London. Had Malone interrupted them? Did they finish their task? Or had Haddad fled into hiding? Impossible to know, since his operative had wisely stayed with Malone.

No feeling of triumph surged through him, though he'd managed to locate Haddad exactly according to plan. He could only hope his operative had done her job equally well.

He'd saved it for last, but the computer was next. So he switched on the machine and scanned its screen.

For all his messiness in the apartment Haddad seemed to have been a meticulous electronic organizer.

He opened a few files and scrolled through.

Haddad had researched the Library of Alexandria in great detail. But interestingly he'd also studied the Guardians. Alfred Hermann had told Sabre about them. Jonah had filled in some of the blanks. But one of Haddad's files offered even more.

...their origins are unknown, lost due to the absurdity of ancient men who, without impunity, erased human memory.

By the time of the second century, man had mastered the arts of war and torture. In many parts of the world empires had been formed, which provided laws and a measure of security. But neither of those concepts protected people from their own rulers. Religion formed, and priests became the willing ally of despots. Egypt was one place where this travesty occurred. But sometime around the second century, an Egyptian religious order emerged that worshiped not power but the preservation of knowledge.

A crude form of monastery had then begun where men of like mind and purpose congregated. These places were intentionally isolated and notoriously avoided. This one group was fortunate. Its members actually staffed both libraries at Alexandria as clerks and stewards. From these service posts access to everything was possible, and as the human race prospered and learned more how to annihilate one another, this group withdrew into itself.

Originally they merely copied texts, but eventually they pilfered. The sheer volume of the library (several hundred thousand manuscripts) forced decisions, but over the next three hundred years, as the library fell farther out of favor, stealing texts became easier, particularly since no accurate inventories existed. By the time of the Muslim invasion in the seventh century, the Guardians owned a great deal of the library at Alexandria. That was when they disappeared, reemerging from time to time, offering invitations to come and learn.

Sabre kept reading, wondering how George Haddad had managed to obtain such detailed information. This Palestinian seemed full of surprises.

Movement at the corner of his eye brought his senses alert. Shadows came alive. A dark form crept closer.

His hands left the keyboard. Unfortunately he carried no weapon. He whirled, ready for a fight.

A woman materialized into the glow of the computer screen.

His operative.

"That sort of foolishness can get you hurt," he said.

"I'm not in the mood."

He regularly employed her to help all over Britain. She was slender-boned and fine-featured. Today her black hair was brushed tight and caught into a heavy plait.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

"Following Malone. They're in a hotel near Hyde Park."

"What about Haddad?"

She shook her head. "Don't know. I stayed with Malone. He took a chance coming back up here-the police were on the way-and he left with that satchel."

He admired her instincts. "We still need to find the Palestinian."

"He'll come back, if he's not dead already. You look different."

Gone were his gleaming dark locks and shaggy clothes. Instead his hair was short, windblown, and sandy brown. He was neatly dressed in jeans and a canvas shirt beneath a cloth jacket. Before leaving Germany he'd first reported what he'd learned to the Blue Chair, then made the physical change-all part of his carefully conceived plan, most of which Alfred Hermann knew little about.

"You approve?" he asked.

"I liked the other look."

He shrugged. "Maybe next time. What's happening?"

"I have somebody watching the hotel. They'll call if Malone moves."

"Nothing more from the Israelis?"

"Their man tore off from here."

He looked around. Maybe he'd just wait for Haddad to return. That seemed the easiest course. He definitely needed everything off Haddad's computer, but he didn't want to take the machine. Too cumbersome. A copy would be better, and he noticed a flash drive lying among the clutter. He grabbed the gadget and snapped it into an empty USB port.

He checked the drive. Empty.

A few clicks of the mouse and he'd copied all the files from the hard drive.

Then he noticed something else, beyond the monitor.

A tiny red light.

He stared closer through the mess of paper and spotted a pocket tape recorder lying on the table. He lifted the unit and noticed no difference in the coating of dust that frosted the desktop. Which meant the unit had been laid there recently. The tape was spent, but the power remained on.

He flicked REWIND.

His operative stood silent.

He engaged PLAY.

The entire encounter between Malone, Haddad, and eventually the Israelis had been recorded. He listened in amazement to Haddad's murder. The last thing he heard was Cotton Malone's declaration that he intended to kill the son of a bitch.

He switched off the machine.

"Haddad's dead?" the woman said. "Killed here? Why isn't this a crime scene?"

"I assume the Israelis cleaned up before the police arrived."

"Now what?"

"We have Malone. Let's see where he leads."

THIRTY-ONE

MALONE LEFT THE ROOM AND WALKED DOWN THE HALL. HE'D earlier noticed an ice machine, which was surprising. More and more American conveniences seemed to be invading European hotels.

He was angry at himself for placing Pam in danger. But at the time, what choice had there been? He couldn't have left her at Heathrow with a man following. And who was he? Perhaps involved with those who'd taken Gary? That seemed logical. But he still knew precious little.

The Israelis had reacted promptly to Haddad's signal that he was alive. Yet Pam was right. With Haddad dead, their interests were protected, their problem solved. Still, Pam had been the one followed. Not him.

Why?

He found the ice machine and discovered that it wasn't working. Though the compressor churned, no ice filled the bin. Much like America, too, he thought.

He pushed through the stairway door and descended one floor.

There the machine was brimming with ice. He stood in a cubicle off the hall and filled his bucket.

He heard a door to one of the rooms slam shut, then voices. He was still scooping ice when two men passed the alcove, talking excitedly. He turned to leave and caught the facial profile of one of the men, along with his lanky frame and sunburned skin.

String Bean. From Heathrow.

Here, one floor down from where they were staying.

He retreated into the alcove and peered around the doorway, watching as the men entered the elevator.

Heading up.

He bolted for the stairwell door and leaped up the risers. He eased open the door just as the elevator dinged and the two men strolled from the car.

He slipped out the door and carefully peered down the corridor. He watched as one of the men scooped a used room-service tray from the carpet and balanced it on one hand. The other man withdrew a short-barreled revolver. They were headed straight for the room where Pam was waiting.

He cursed himself.

Haddad's gun was on a table in the room. He hadn't brought it with him. Real smart. He'd have to improvise.

The men stopped at the door. The one with the gun knocked, then stepped to one side. The other pretended to be a steward, the tray balanced high on one hand.

Another knock.

Maybe Pam was still on the phone with Gary? Which would give him the moment he needed.

"Room service," he heard the man say.

Unlike American hotels, where peepholes were standard, the British did not usually provide them, and this hotel was no exception. He could only hope Pam would not be foolish enough to turn the knob.

"I have a food order for you," the man said in a raised voice.

A pause.

"A gentleman placed the order."

Damn. She could readily believe he might have ordered while she was sleeping. He had to act. He raised the ice bucket to shield his face and started down the hall.

"The food is for this room," the man was explaining.

He heard locks releasing.

Peering around the raised bucket he saw the armed man notice him. The gun was immediately shielded. Malone used that moment of relaxation to his advantage and slung the ice and bucket into the armed man's face, then planted his right fist into the jaw of the man with the tray. He felt bone crack and the man slammed to the carpet, the tray and its contents scattered.

Ice Man recovered from the initial shock and was raising his gun when Malone pounded two blows to the head and jammed a knee into the chest.

The assailant crumpled downward and lay still.

The room door opened.

Pam stared at him.

"Why would you open that door?" he asked.

"I thought you ordered food."

He grabbed the gun and stuffed it in his belt. "And I wouldn't have told you?" He quickly searched both men but found no identification.

"Who are they?" Pam asked.

"That's the one following you in the airport."

He grabbed String Bean's arms and dragged him into their room. He then gripped the other man's legs and pulled him inside. "You're a stubborn woman." He kicked the door shut.

"I was hungry."

"How's Gary?"

"He's doing well. But I didn't get to say much."

One of the men started moaning. They'd be conscious soon. He grabbed the leather satchel and Haddad's gun. "Let's go."

"We're leaving?"

"Unless you want to be around when they wake up."

He saw that prospect was not appealing to her.

"You have a gun," she reminded him.

"Which I don't want to use. This isn't the Wild West. We're in a hotel, with people. So let's do the smart thing and leave. There are plenty more hotels in this town."

She grabbed the shawl and gently wrapped her shoulders. They left the room and quickly caught the elevator. Downstairs, they exited into a chilly night. He surveyed his surroundings and concluded it was going to be tough to know if they were being followed. Simply too much to watch. The nearest Tube station was two blocks away, so he headed for it, determined to keep a lookout.

His mind churned.

How had the man from Heathrow found them? Even more troubling, how did the man pretending to be a steward know that he wasn't in the room?

A gentleman placed the order.

He faced Pam as they walked. "Did you tell that guy through the door that you didn't order anything?"

She nodded. "That's when he said you did."

Not entirely correct. He'd said a gentleman placed the order.

But still. Lucky guess?

No way.