A Fatal Frame of Mind (24 page)

For a moment there was no sound in the airplane’s cabin besides the low whoosh of the engines. Then Shawn shook off the mood Kitteredge’s tale had cast.

“That’s a great story, but it’s got a lot of holes,” Shawn said.

“If we had more time, I could go into the research that led me to these conclusions,” Kitteredge said.

“The only conclusion I care about is the one to Clay Filkins’ life,” Shawn said. “There’s nothing in that entire fairy tale about your Cabal or the mysterious Mr. Pollycracker.”

“Polidori,” Gus corrected him, then realized that the rest of what Shawn had said was right. “What about the Cabal? You said they were secretly supporting the search for the sword?”

“That is my working hypothesis,” Kitteredge said. “But not just the sword. They needed a figurehead to wield it for them; that’s why they chose Morris as their tool to recover it, why they gave him the initial clues to its existence and then stayed out of his way as he, too, became obsessed with the hunt.”

“They must have been mighty ticked when he gave it up,” Shawn said.

“You could say that,” Kitteredge said. “I believe it was no coincidence that shortly after Morris renounced his claim on the sword, Rossetti took ill and began the downward spiral that led quickly to his death.”

“What happened to them after that?” Gus said.

“You have to understand,” Kitteredge said, “that this is a shadowy and secretive organization. They show their heads above water only when there is a matter important enough to force them to take the risk. So I have lost track of them for many years after that. They allowed Morris to live on, possibly hoping he’d change his mind and lead them to Excalibur. And I’ve found no signs of their activity for more than a hundred years afterward. Until I began to discover the truth about the sword. Then they came after me.”

G
us leaned forward in his seat as far as the belt would let him. “How? How did they come after you?”

Kitteredge let out a deep sigh. “There, too, I can point to no concrete proof that will convince someone eager not to believe. Their existence is a matter of shadows and rumors. Or at least it was until they made contact with me several years back.”

“What kind of contact?” Gus said.

“Was it a phone call, or more of a ‘stick a sword through a guy and leave him on the floor’ kind of thing?” Shawn said.

“It was an infiltration,” Kitteredge said. “Polidori sent a spy into my class. His son, or so young Chip Polidori claimed.”

“Chip?” Shawn said incredulously. “The greatest conspiracy in the history of mankind, and they send an operative named Chip?”

“That was what he claimed,” Kitteredge said. “I have no reason to assume it was his real name, or even that he was actually related to the man he called his father. He used his time at the university to get close to me, eventually convincing me to take him on as one of my research assistants. This was at a key point in my investigation, when I was just beginning to realize what was at stake, and I’m afraid that in my enthusiasm I was too eager to share my discoveries. I let slip to this young man that I believed I’d found a lead on the location of Excalibur.”

“What did he do?” Gus said.

“He did nothing I could prove,” Kitteredge said. “They are too smart for that. But when I shortly thereafter made my first trip to London to locate the sword based on the clues I had discovered in several of Morris’ longer poems, they started to act directly to impede my progress. One of my suitcases was rerouted by the airline and sent to Mombasa. My hotel reservation was canceled with no explanation. A pickpocket managed to steal my passport, and I spent much of my trip at the American embassy trying to have it replaced. And the day of my appointment at the British Library, there was a twenty-four-hour tube strike that essentially shut down all of central London.”

“That’s all?” Gus said.

“Airline, hotels, labor unions, and street crime,” Kitteredge said. “This Cabal clearly had fingers in all four areas. Isn’t that enough?”

Gus felt a cold chill of fear pierce his heart. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a sensation like this when listening to Kitteredge talk about the Cabal, but previously it had come from imagining the global reach of the terrible conspiracy. This time it was a completely different kind of alarm.

“But that could all have been coincidence, couldn’t it?” Gus said. “Airlines lose suitcases all the time, hotels screw up reservations, pickpockets steal things. And disgruntled employees go out on strike. There’s no way to say they’re connected.”

Gus shot a panicked look at Shawn, looking for some reinforcement. But Shawn just shrugged.

“That’s exactly what they want us to think,” Kitteredge said. “They continue to thrive because people don’t want to believe there are forces so great and so evil at work in the world. But they showed themselves to me. Oh, yes, they exposed themselves. By the time I was finally able to access the archives at the British Library, where I believed I would find my next lead in Morris’ manuscript of the first part of his mammoth
Earthly Paradise
, it was clear that someone had been there shortly before me.”

“The library wouldn’t have those papers if people weren’t interested in them,” Gus said. “And I’m sure you’re not the only scholar in the world to make an appointment that week.”

“Not the only scholar, no,” Kitteredge said. “But I was able to see the log of people who’d had access in the previous two days. And at the exact period during which I was marooned at the embassy, a man named Paul Dorrington was searching in Morris’ manuscripts.”

Gus stared at Kitteredge blankly, waiting for an explanation from the professor. Instead, it came from Shawn.

“Paul Dorrington,” Shawn said. “A fake name, but one left deliberately to tell you they’d been there first. Paul Dorrington. Polidori.”

“Exactly,” Kitteredge said.

“The names aren’t even all that similar,” Gus said, feeling the veins throbbing in his temples. “It’s probably all a coincidence.”

“The second time is coincidence,” Shawn said.

“
What
?” Gus nearly screamed.

“First time is happenstance, second time is coincidence, third time is enemy action,” Shawn said. “And while Goldfinger never said what came next, I think we’re about to find out.”

Kitteredge nearly applauded; he was so pleased with Shawn’s insight. He was about to speak when Malko’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“We’re about to start our final descent, so if you need to move around the cabin, this would be a good time to do it,” he said.

Kitteredge unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, his head brushing the cabin’s ceiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to freshen up before we land,” he said.

Gus waited until the professor had disappeared into the lavatory before daring to open his mouth. Then he turned to Shawn, his face ashen.

“Did you hear that?” Gus said.

“Everyone makes noises in the bathroom,” Shawn said. “The polite thing is simply to ignore it.”

Gus stared at Shawn, trying to figure out if the cabin pressure change had turned his brains into cream of mushroom soup. “What he was saying,” Gus said. “Did you hear what he was saying?”

“I thought the story about Morris and Rossetti and the wife was quite poignant,” Shawn said. “And as a parallel for the original Arthurian legend, quite a fascinating bit of literary detective work.”

“Yeah, that stuff was great,” Gus said. “Really hung together well. Made perfect sense. And then he started talking about other stuff, and how it all hung together and made perfect sense.”

“And?” Shawn said.

“And he’s insane!” Gus nearly shouted. “He’s taking random incidents that have absolutely nothing to do with each other and stringing them together to create evidence that there’s a conspiracy out to get him!”

“That’s an interesting observation,” Shawn said. “That the man who claims some museum employee was murdered in Santa Barbara by a centuries-old cabal dedicated to finding King Arthur’s sword and taking over England is actually insane. How would you ever come to such a conclusion?”

Frantically Gus thought back over everything Kitteredge had said to them—and that he’d believed. Piece by piece, everything hung together. There was not a single flaw anywhere in the internal logic of the conspiracy theory.

But it was ridiculous. And Gus had been so interested about seeing where every new piece would lead that he never stopped to consider the thought that he shouldn’t be letting Kitteredge lead in the first place.

“If everything Kitteredge has been saying is based on a fantasy, then we can’t trust any of the assumptions we’ve been working under,” Gus said.

“That’s a good point,” Shawn said.

“And if he really is crazy, then . . .” Gus trailed off, unable to bring himself to finish the sentence.

“Then it’s possible that he’s the one who killed Clay Filkins,” Shawn said. “And we’ve helped a murderer flee the country.”

Gus let that horrifying thought bounce around his brain. There had to be a way out of this disaster. There had to be. He just couldn’t begin to think of one. “What are we going to do?”

“Plead guilty,” Shawn said.

I
f Shawn and Gus had ever been in a situation that called for a complicated plan to get out of, this was it. They were ten thousand miles away from home with no passports, with no return ticket, and suspected of helping an accused murderer escape justice. To make matters worse, those suspicions were almost certainly correct.

Unfortunately, there was no time to formulate a complicated plan. During the few moments before Kitteredge emerged from the lavatory and the plane began its final descent, they might have been able to rough out the basics of a simpler one. But Gus’ mind couldn’t focus on planning because something else had driven everything else out.

“You’ve believed all this time that Kitteredge was crazy,” Gus said, checking to make sure the professor hadn’t stepped back into the main cabin.

“You didn’t?” Shawn said.

“You know I didn’t,” Gus said.

“Well, here’s a handy hint, then,” Shawn said. “When someone comes up to you in the supermarket and says that all those jars of Best Foods are actually alien eggs, and one day they are all going to hatch into ferocious monsters that will explode out of refrigerators across the West Coast—the East is safe because labeling them Hellman’s destroys them—and kill everyone, and he’s the only one who knows, you want to err on the side of assuming he’s not operating at one hundred percent.”

“Professor Kitteredge never said anything about mayonnaise,” Gus hissed angrily.

“It’s not the condiment that matters,” Shawn said. “Unless you’re making a turkey sandwich, and then you really want the sweetness you only get in Miracle Whip. The point is, whenever you hear that magic phrase ‘and I’m the only one who knows,’ it’s time to head for the hills.”

“But you let us follow him,” Gus said.

“I let
you
follow him,” Shawn corrected.

“You’re in the same private jet I am.”

“True,” Shawn said. “And wearing the same clothes as you, too. But this was your case, so I thought we should do things your way.”

Gus glared at him, the truth only now hitting home. “You’re saying this is all my fault?”

“I hadn’t actually thought it was necessary for me to use those exact words, but if you’d like me to, all right,” Shawn said. “This is all your fault.”

“I didn’t hear you presenting an alternative plan,” Gus said.

“I had an excellent alternative, which would have wrapped up our role in this case ages ago.”

“And you didn’t think it might be a good idea to mention it to me?” Gus said.

“I begged, I pleaded, I urged,” Shawn said. “But no matter what I said, you refused to call off your doomed trip to the museum and come with me to the C. Thomas Howell Film Festival.”

Gus was momentarily struck speechless. Even when he regained the use of his tongue, he found it impossible to do anything but restate the obvious. “You allowed all this to happen just because you didn’t get your way.”

“Sometimes words aren’t enough,” Shawn said. “You need to give a concrete example so the lesson is learned. Next time, you’ll listen to me.”

“What next time?” Gus said. “We’ll be lucky not to spend the rest of our lives in jail.”

“But if we don’t, when I tell you that the Ralph Macchio Film Festival starts next month, you’ll be first in line for tickets.”

Before Gus could respond, the lavatory door opened and Kitteredge shambled his way back to his seat. “I want to thank you gentlemen for accompanying me on this adventure,” he said as he buckled himself in. “I know we’re not arriving in ideal circumstances, but soon we will be heroes to the world. We do have some work to do first.”

“Yeah, fifty years of it,” Gus said glumly. “Breaking rocks.”

The meaning of Gus’ words seemed to fly right over Kitteredge’s head as he leaned over to pick up a small notebook that had slipped out of his pocket. He flipped through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. “It’s just one more puzzle, and then we’ll have our answer. We simply need to understand the meaning of this phrase: ‘Let not my rusting tears make your sword light! Ah! God of mercy, how he turns away! So, ever must I dress me to the fight.’ Any thoughts?”

Gus had one, but it wasn’t going to be much use. He turned away, hoping to hide his rapidly approaching panic attack, and saw that the ground was rising even more quickly. But it wasn’t like any airport approach he’d ever seen. The countryside below was a patchwork of varying shades of green, each one bordered by darker green hedgerows. He couldn’t help but compare it to the gigantic corn and wheat fields he’d flown over when he traveled across the United States and think that it looked magically antique, as if their flight had gone off course and they were landing in the outskirts of Fairyland.