The Alexandria Link

THIRTY-TWO

WASHINGTON, DC

9:00 PM

STEPHANIE LED CASSIOPEIA THROUGH THE QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD. For the past few hours they’d stayed hidden in the suburbs. She’d made one call to Billet headquarters from a pay phone at a Cracker Barrel restaurant and learned that there had been no contact from Malone. Not so from the White House. Larry Daley’s office had called three times. She’d told her staff to say that she’d get back to him at her first opportunity. Aggravating, she knew. But let Daley wonder if the next time he saw her jovial face, it would be live on CNN. That fear should be enough, for now, to keep the deputy national security adviser in check. Heather Dixon and the Israelis, though, were another matter.

“Where are we going?” Cassiopeia asked.

“To deal with a problem.”

The neighborhood was heavy with beaux arts architecture that had been fashionable, she realized, with the nineteenth-century industrialists who’d first populated the tree-lined avenues. Colonial row houses and cobblestoned walks only added to the wealthy mien in the night air.

“I’m not one of your agents,” Cassiopeia said. “I like to know what I’m getting into.”

“You can leave whenever you want.”

“Nice try. You’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

“Then stop asking questions. You quiz Thorvaldsen like this?”

“Why don’t you like him? In France you stayed at his throat.”

“Look where I am, Cassiopeia. Cotton’s in a mess. My own people want me dead. The Israelis and Saudis are both after me. You think it’s wise I like anyone?”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

No, it wasn’t. But she couldn’t voice the truth. That through his association with her late husband, Thorvaldsen had come to know her strengths and weaknesses, and near him she felt vulnerable.

“Let’s just say that he and I are far too well acquainted with each other.”

“Henrik’s worried about you. That’s why he asked me to come. He sensed trouble.”

“And I appreciate that. But it doesn’t mean I have to like him.”

She spotted the house, another of the many symmetrical brick residences with carvings, a portico, and a mansard roof. Lights burned only in the downstairs windows. She scanned the street.

Still quiet.

“Follow me.”

ALFRED HERMANN RARELY SLEPT. HE’D CONDITIONED HIS mind long ago to operate on less than three hours’ rest.

He was not old enough to have personally experienced World War II, though he harbored vivid childhood memories of Nazis parading through the streets of Vienna. In the decades after, he’d actively battled the Soviets and challenged their puppet regimes that had dominated Austria. Hermann money dated from the Hapsburgs and had managed to survive two centuries of volatile politics. During the past fifty years the family fortune had grown tenfold, and much of that success could be traced to the Order of the Golden Fleece. To be intimately associated with such a select group from around the world came with advantages that his father and grandfather had never enjoyed. But to be in charge-that provided even greater benefits.

His tenure, though, was coming to an end.

At his death, his daughter would inherit everything. And the thought was not comforting. True, she was like him in some ways. Bold and determined, and she appreciated the past and coveted, with an enthusiasm similar to his own, that most precious of human commodities-knowledge. But she remained unpolished. A work in progress. One he feared might never be completed.

He stared at his daughter who, like him, slept little. He’d named her Margarete, after his mother. She was admiring the model of the Library of Alexandria.

“Can we find it?” she quietly asked.

He stepped close. “I believe Dominick is near.”

She appraised him with keen gray eyes. “Sabre is not to be trusted. No American should be.”

They’d had this discussion before. “I trust no one.”

“Not even me?”

He grinned. They’d had this discussion before, too. “Not even you.”

“Sabre has too much freedom.”

“Why begrudge him? We give him difficult tasks. You can’t do that and expect him to work as we see fit.”

“He’s a problem-American ingenuity and all that-you just don’t know it.”

“He’s a willful man. He needs purpose. We provide that to him. In return he furthers our goals.”

“I’ve sensed more from him lately. He tries hard to mask his ambition, but it’s there. You just have to pay attention.”

He thought he’d taunt her. “Perhaps you’re attracted to him?”

She scoffed at his question. “That’ll never happen. In fact, I’ll fire him once you’re gone.”

He wondered about her assumption that she would inherit all that he owned. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be Blue Chair. That selection is made among the Chairs.”

“I’ll be in the Circle. I assure you. It’s a simple step from there to where you are.”

But he wasn’t so sure. He knew of her contacts with the other four Chairs. He’d actually encouraged them as a test. His wealth far surpassed that of the others in age, volume, and scope. Financial institutions he controlled were heavily entangled with many members, including three of the Chairs. Never would any of them want others to know of that vulnerability, and the price of his silence had always been their loyalty. He’d manipulated their weaknesses for decades, but his daughter’s attempts had been feeble. So a word of caution was in order. “Once I’m gone, it’s true, Dominick will have to deal with you, as you will with him. But don’t be so quick. Men like him, with little emotion? No morals? A daring heart? You might find them valuable.”

He hoped she was listening but feared, as always, that her ears remained filtered. Her mother had died when she was eight and, in her youth, she’d seemed a product of him-of the rib, she liked to say-yet age had not matured that early promise. Her education had started in France, continued in England, and was completed in Austria, her business experience honed in the boardrooms of his many corporations.

But the reports from there had not been encouraging.

“What would you do if you found the library?” she asked.

He concealed his amusement. She apparently did not want to discuss Sabre or herself anymore. “It’s beyond imagining what great thoughts are there.”

“I heard you speaking yesterday about those. Tell me more.”

“Ah, the Piri Reis Map, from 1513, found in Istanbul. I was running on about that. I didn’t know you were listening.”

“I always listen.”

He grinned at the observation. They both knew it wasn’t so.

“I was telling the chancellor of how the map had been drawn on a gazelle hide by a Turkish admiral who was once a pirate. Full of incredible detail. The South American coastline is there, though European navigators hadn’t yet charted that region. The Antarctic continent is also shown, long before being coated with ice. Only recently, using ground radar, have we been able to determine that shoreline’s contour. Yet the 1513 representation is as good as ours. On the face of the map, the cartographer noted that he used charts drawn in the days of Alexander, Lord of the Two Horns. Can you imagine? Perhaps ancient navigators visited Antarctica thousands of years ago, before the ice accumulated, and recorded what they saw.”

Hermann’s mind swirled with what else may have been lost from the fields of mathematics, astronomy, geometry, meteorology, and medicine.

“Unrecorded knowledge is either forgotten or muddled beyond recognition. Do you know of Democritus? He conceived the notion that all things were made of a finite number of discrete particles. Today we call them atoms, but he was the first to acknowledge their existence and formulate the atomic theory. He wrote seventy books-we know that from other references-yet not one has survived. And centuries passed before other men, in other times, thought of the same thing.

“Almost nothing Pythagoras wrote remains. Manetho recorded Egypt’s history. Gone. Galen, the great Roman healer? He wrote five hundred treatises on medicine. Only fragments remain. Aristarchus thought that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. But Copernicus, who lived seventeen centuries later, is the man history credits with that revelation.”

He thought of more. Erathosthenes and Strabo, geographers. Archimedes, the physicist and mathematician. Zenodotus and his grammar. Callimachus the poet. Thales, the first philosopher.

All their ideas gone.

“It’s always been the same,” he said. “Knowledge is the first thing eradicated once power is attained. History has proven that over and over.”

“So what is it Israel fears?” she asked.

He knew she’d eventually work him around to that subject.

“Perhaps it’s more fear than reality,” she noted. “Changing the world is difficult.”

“But it can be done. Men-” He paused. “-and women have done it for centuries. And violence has not always brought about the most monumental changes. Often it’s been mere words. The Bible fundamentally changed mankind. The Koran likewise. The Magna Carta. The American Constitution. Billions of people govern their lives by those words. Society has been altered by them. It’s not so much the wars as the treaties that follow that truly alter the course of history. The Marshall Plan changed the world more expressly than World War II itself. Words are indeed the true weapons of mass destruction.”

“You dodged my question,” she said in a playful tone, one that reminded him of his long-dead wife.

“What is it Israel fears?” he repeated.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Perhaps I don’t know.”

“I doubt it.”

He considered telling her everything. But he hadn’t survived by being foolish. Loose talk had been the downfall of more than one successful man.

“Let’s simply say that the truth is always difficult to accept. For people, for cultures, even for nations.”

STEPHANIE LED THE WAY INTO THE REAR YARD AND WAS STARTLED by its manicured appearance. Flowers abounded. Colorful asters, waxbells, goldenrod, pansies, and mums. A terrace formed a peninsula, its flagstones dotted with wrought-iron furniture, more blooms sprouting from decorative pots.

She guided Cassiopeia to the thick trunk of a tall maple, one of three stately trees shading the garden.

She checked her watch: 9:43 PM.

She’d brought them this far through a combination of anger and curiosity, but the next step was where she irrefutably crossed the line.

“Get that air pistol ready,” she whispered.

Her cohort slid a dart down the barrel. “I hope you note my blind obedience to this foolishness.”

She considered the next move.

Breaking into the house was certainly an option. Cassiopeia possessed the requisite skills. But simply knocking on the door would work, too. She actually liked that approach. Their course, though, was instantly set when the rear door opened and a black form strolled out among the slender pillars supporting a shallow colonnade. The tall man was wearing a bathrobe tied at the waist, his feet sheathed in slippers that scraped off the terrace.

She motioned to the gun, then at the form.

Cassiopeia aimed and fired.

A soft pop, then a swish accompanied the dart’s flight.

Its tip found the man, who cried out as his hand reached for his shoulder. He seemed to fiddle with the dart, then gasped as he collapsed.

Stephanie raced over. “Stuff works fast.”

“That’s the idea. Who is this?”

They stared down at the man.

“Congratulations. You just shot the attorney general of the United States. Now help me drag him into the house.”