Library of the Dead

AUGUST 1, 2009

Will tried to be invisible. People were rushing past him, heading toward the bungalow. Two sprinting hotel security guards in blue blazers elbowed him off the path. He kept walking slowly, impassively, in the opposite direction through the hotel gardens, a man with a briefcase shaking inside his suit.

As the doors to the main building closed behind him, he heard muffled shouts from the bungalow area. All hell was about to break loose. Sirens were approaching; response times are fast in ritzy zips, he thought. He needed to make a snap decision. He could try to make it to his car or stay put and hide in plain sight. The tactic had worked at the beauty salon so he decided to try it again, and besides, he was too unsteady to do much more.

The front desk was in turmoil. Guests were reporting gunshots, security protocols were being enacted. He briskly strode past overwrought employees and angled toward the elevators, where he hopped on a waiting car and randomly pressed the third-floor button.

The corridor was empty except for a service cart in front of a room halfway down the hall. He peeked into the partially open door of Room 315 and saw a housekeeper vacuuming.

"Hello!" he called out as blithely as he could.

The maid smiled at him, "Hello, sir. I'll be finishing soon." There were bags, a man's clothes in the closet.

"I'm back early from a meeting," Will said. "I've got to make a call."

"No problem, sir. Just call housekeeping when you like and I can come back."

He was alone.

Looking out the garden-facing window, he saw police and paramedics. He slumped on the side chair and closed his eyes. He didn't know how much time he had-he needed to think.

Will was back on the fishing boat with his father, Phillip Weston Piper, who was silently baiting a line. He'd always thought it a grand-sounding name for a man with rough hands and sun-beaten skin who made his living arresting drunks and ticketing speeders. His grandfather had been a social studies teacher in a Pensacola junior high school with high hopes for his newborn son and thought a posh name would give him a leg up in the world. It was a nonfactor. His father grew up to be a fun-hunting carouser and booze hound who drank his way through life and was a miserable bully of a husband who subjected his mother to a constant fusillade of abuse.

But he was a halfway decent father, taciturn to the extreme, though Will always sensed that he was making the effort to do the right thing for his son. Maybe their relationship would have been better if he'd known in advance that his father was going to die during his senior year at college. Maybe then he would have made the first move and engaged the man in a conversation to find out what he thought of his life, his family, his son. But that conversation was buried with Phillip Weston Piper, and now he had to go through life without it.

Will never thought much about religion or philosophy. His business was, in effect, the death business, and his approach to the investigation of murders was fact-based. Some people lived, others died-wrong place, wrong time. There was a terrible randomness to it.

His mother had been a church woman, and when he visited, he dutifully accompanied her to the First Baptist Church in Panama City. She was mourned there when cancer took her. He had heard his fill of will-of-God talk and divine plans. He'd read about Calvinism and predestination in school. All this was hokum, he always thought. Chaos and randomness ruled the world. There was no master plan.

Apparently, he'd been wrong.

He opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. The entire Beverly Hills police force was down in the garden. More EMTs and paramedics were arriving. He reached for the laptop and opened it. It was in sleep mode. When it resumed, the log-on window to Shackleton's database demanded a password. Will misspelled Pythagoras three times before getting it right. So much for his Harvard education.

There was a search screen: enter name, enter DOB, enter DOD, enter city, enter zip code, enter street address. It was all very user-friendly. He typed his own name and his DOB, and the computer told him: BTH. Fine, he thought, confirmed. Hopefully not BTH the way Mark Shackleton was BTH, but he had at least eighteen years in him, a lifetime.

The next entries wouldn't be so easy. He hesitated, considered shutting the computer down, but there were more sirens, more shouts from the garden. He inhaled sharply then typed, Laura Jean Piper, 7-8-1984, then hit the Enter key. BTH

He exhaled, and silently mouthed, Thank God.

Then he inhaled again and typed, Nancy Lipinski, White Plains, NY, and hit Enter. BTH

One more to solidify his plan: Jim Zeckendorf, Weston, Massachusetts. BTH

That's all I want to know, that's all I need to know, he thought. He was trembling.

As he sat there, the logic seemed inescapable. He, his daughter, and Nancy were going to survive despite the operatives who were tasked to kill in order to keep Area 51 secret. That meant he was going to take an action that prevented their deaths.

It was madness! Take free will and throw it out the window, he thought. He was being carried downstream by the River of Destiny. He was not the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.

He was crying now, for the first time since the day his father died.

While trauma teams were transporting the wounded from the bungalow to waiting ambulances, Will was at the desk in Room 315, composing a letter on hotel stationery. He finished and reread it. There was a blank he needed to fill in before dropping it in a mailbox.

The beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills was marred by the noise and diesel stench of dozens of emergency service vehicles and news vans spewing fumes up and down Sunset Boulevard. He walked past them, head down, and hailed a taxi.

"Hell's going on here?" the driver asked him.

"Damned if I know," Will answered.

"Where to?"

"Take me to any kind of computer store, the L.A. public library, and a post office. In that order. This is extra." He reached over the seat and dropped a hundred dollars in the driver's lap.

"You want it, mister, you got it," the cabbie said enthusiastically.

At a Radio Shack, Will bought a memory stick. Back in the taxi, he quickly copied Mark's database onto the device and tucked it into his breast pocket.

He had the taxi wait outside the Central Library, a white art deco palace near Pershing Square in downtown L.A. After a stop at the information desk, he headed deep into the bowels of the stacks. In the raw fluorescence of a sublevel, in a basement area that rarely saw foot traffic, he thought about crazy Donny and quietly thanked him for giving him the idea of a perfect hiding place.

An entire case was devoted to the thick, musty, decades-old volumes of Los Angeles County municipal codes. When he was certain no one was about, he reached on tiptoes for the highest shelf and wriggled out the 1947 volume, a hefty book that slid heavily onto his outstretched palm.

Nineteen forty-seven. A small touch of irony on a grim day. The book smelled old and unused, and unless something went terribly wrong, he was confident he would be the last person to handle it for a very long time. He opened it to the middle. The binding over the spine splayed an inch, forming the pocket he used to deeply insert the memory stick. When he closed the tome, the binding stretched and creaked, the sliver of hardware swallowed up, well-concealed.

His next stop was a quick one, the nearest post office, where he purchased a stamp and dropped the completed letter into the first-class slot. It was addressed to Jim Zeckendorf at his Boston law firm. There was an envelope within an envelope. The cover letter began: Jim, I'm sorry to get you involved in something complicated but I need your help. If I don't personally contact you by the first Tuesday of every month for the foreseeable future, I want you to open the sealed envelope and follow the instructions.

Back in the taxi, he told the driver, "Okay, last stop. Take me to Grauman's Chinese Theater."

"You don't hit me as the tourist type," the driver said.

"I like crowds."

The Hollywood sidewalk was thick with tourists and hawkers. Will stood on the square of cement inscribed, TO SID, MANY HAPPY TRAILS, ROY ROGERS AND TRIGGER, complete with handprints, footprints, and horseshoe prints. He fished the phone out of his pocket and turned it on.

She picked up quickly, as if she'd been holding the phone, waiting for it to ring.

"Jesus, Will, are you okay?"

"I've had a heck of a day, Nancy. How are you?"

"Worried sick. Did you find him?"

"Yeah, but I can't talk. We're being monitored."

"Are you safe?"

"I'm covered. I'll be fine."

"What can I do?"

"Wait for me, and tell me again that you love me."

"I love you."

He hung up and got a number from information. With tenacity, he jawboned his way up the line until he was one step away from speaking to his target. He cut through the officiousness of the staffer. "Yeah, this is Special Agent Will Piper of the FBI. Tell the Secretary of the Navy I'm on the line. Tell him I was with Mark Shackleton earlier today. Tell him I know all about Area 51. And tell him he has one minute to pick up the phone."