Tears of the Jaguar (35 page)

He returned the knife to its box, closed it, and set it on the desk. Then he closed the door behind him. He had his attaché case with him and he set this down, opening it without looking at her, then reached inside.

“What if I had been someone else?” he said.

“You are the only one with a key to the suite,” she said, unoffended. “I certainly wouldn’t have taken the risk if I thought anyone else could walk in. I just wanted to make sure everything was ready.”

He nodded.

“Naturally,” he said. “Do you have the envelope?”

Mrs. Pickins opened the folder she had set on the desk and removed a large padded FedEx envelope.

“Excellent,” he said.

He lifted a Ziploc bag from the attaché case and handed it to her. It contained a lock of blond hair, bound at one end by a rubber band.

“You have the address?” he said, as she slipped the bag into the envelope along with the box containing the obsidian knife and sealed it up.

“Of course,” she said, slightly affronted.

“Of course,” he echoed. “Track it, please. I want to know when it gets there.”

“Absolutely,” said Gloria Pickins. She took a step away from the cabinet and then caught herself. “Shall I close this up for you, Mr. Powel?”

“No,” he said, his eyes moving slowly over the contents. “Leave it open.”

The Tower was, perhaps, the greatest of England’s storied historical landmarks. The present buildings spread out from William the Conqueror’s eleventh-century keep, or White Tower, which stood in the middle, a square stone block broken with windows and ornamented with corner turrets and crenellated battlements. Around it the famous ravens circled. Legend had it that if they left, the Tower and—by extension—the nation itself would crumble. To be on the safe side, the present ravens, Deborah read in her guidebook, had select flight feathers clipped.

It was another overcast day promising rain, so the crowds at the Tower, Deborah thought, were to be expected. Still, she hadn’t anticipated the lines for the special exhibits, some of which extended out and around the inner walls in a long queue. Deborah checked her watch irritably.

She was there because of George Withers and Henry Mildmay, though she was far from sure what she believed yet.
Both men had been republicans working under Cromwell during the English Civil War and its aftermath—Withers, the poet, and Mildmay, the keeper of the jewel house where sat the royal regalia.

The fortified museum where the crown jewels were kept.

Even now the idea worked on her system like adrenaline.

Cromwell’s puritanical revolutionaries despised kingship and its trappings as superstitious iconography. It made sense that when they executed the king, they would also do their best to denigrate and devalue those items that had once been symbols of his power. Enter Withers and Mildmay. Politically these men were at the very opposite extreme to the royalist Edward Clifford, and history had documented a particular anecdote that nicely illustrated their politics and their contempt for the monarchy. For a joke, Withers had been crowned king in Westminster Abbey using the actual crown that had been taken from the Tower with Mildmay’s consent. Mildmay, who was later blasted by the Earl of Pembroke as the Knave of Diamonds, and whose job it had been to protect the contents of the jewel house, had allowed every item to be removed. Withers and his pals had taken the vestments, scepters, crowns, and all the royal regalia in an iron chest to the ancient church where English kings had been crowned for centuries. There they had mockingly “crowned” Withers, and the poet had proceeded first to march out about in a stately fashion, and then “with a thousand ridiculous and apish actions, expose the sacred ornaments to contempt and laughter.” The crown had once been sacred, so Cromwell and his men had done their best to make it absurd and contemptible, if only to strip it of the aura of authority that had once kept the nation in awe.

All this had been in the article that had so captivated Deborah on the train ride to London, and she replayed it in her head now as she entered the inner courtyard. She was getting close to the Bloody Tower, where Walter Raleigh had been imprisoned by King James for thirteen years and where—according to popular tradition—the sons of Edward IV were quietly murdered. Most people believed Shakespeare’s version of events, that they were killed by Richard III, a man whose villainy was somehow made manifest by his hunched back and withered arm. Deborah thought of the dwarf Edward Clifford—or Davis, as he was born—and wondered how he had negotiated a culture that saw deformity as a sign of sin.

She passed the green where Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn had been beheaded and, seeing that the lines had not yet shrunk, headed into the White Tower, past a group clustered around a yeoman warder, resplendent in navy blue trimmed with scarlet. The White Tower contained pillars decorated with flintlock pistols, wall displays of muskets and swords, life-sized models of horses barded for battle, and Henry VIII’s armor. The air was filled with camera flashes that bounced off glass and polished steel till she felt she was going to get a headache. It got worse in the room with the headsman’s axe and block, where the tourist excitement—as Frank Hargreaves had said of Jane Scott’s hanging chair—bordered on the ghoulish. She kept moving on and up to the top floor where there were racks for gunpowder barrels. Somehow most of the crowds from the floor below had dispersed, and for a moment Deborah found that she was actually alone in the ancient stone chambers at the top. She browsed for a minute or two, wondering if the lines outside would have gone down, and then she turned and realized she was alone no longer.
A familiar black man in a trench coat, the man who had pursued her through the graves of Newchurch, was standing a few yards away, looking at her.

Deborah drew in her breath sharply and immediately checked the only way out: a stone spiral staircase that descended all the way down to the castle basement, a route he was now blocking. There would be security cameras everywhere, but no one would get to her fast enough if the man had come to kill her. Somewhere outside, a bell started ringing, high and persistent like a fire alarm.

“Deborah Miller?” said the man, flashing a wallet card emblazoned with the letters
CIA
, “I’m agent Kenneth Jones. We need to talk.”

Deborah had been poised to sprint past him for the stairs, but now she hesitated.

CIA?

“What about?” she said.

“Come with me, please,” he replied.

“I don’t think so, Jones,” said Deborah. “If that’s actually your name. I could run off a CIA badge on my home computer in ten minutes, so let’s talk here.”

People would be arriving any moment, she thought. They were bound to. That would give her witnesses and, perhaps, an opportunity to escape. She was not about to be led down that spiral staircase by an armed man.

“I’m afraid that won’t work,” said Jones.

He was an American, or had the accent down, but it was a polished professional tone untouched by regional dialect. The bell was still ringing, and though the man had said nothing, she sensed that he was aware of it. He was tense and urgent.

“We’ll talk here,” she said again, her eyes flashing round the chamber for signs of other people coming in, but there was no sound or movement anywhere on the top floor.

Where was everyone? Was it a fire alarm?

“This is a sensitive matter,” said Jones, and now he reached inside his jacket. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

She knew his hand would emerge with that heavy-looking automatic she had seen in the cemetery. She launched herself toward the stairs, and the movement caught him by surprise. Instead of drawing the gun, he spread his arms to catch her, and as she tried to barrel past he flung himself on her, clamping her arms to her side and slamming her into the wall so her face scraped painfully against the stone.

He was powerfully built, and with a surge of fear she knew she could not hope to wrestle free. Instead she stamped her hiking boot heavily onto the toe of his shoe, and when he gasped and his grip relaxed a fraction, she dug her left elbow hard into his stomach. It was a lucky blow and he was momentarily winded. She burst out of his grip, running full tilt for the stairs. By the time she had begun her descent, he was up and after her again, no more than two or three seconds behind.

Deborah clattered down the spiral staircase, her feet echoing on the wooden steps, grasping at the iron handrail as she half ran, half jumped down, two, sometimes three steps at a time. It was like descending into a well. She passed locked iron gates but still saw no one. The man behind her was coming at least as fast. She could hear his breathing in the stone tube as he pounded down behind her. He was gaining.

She kept going, barely able to breathe, her eyes wide with panic.

Please God, let there be someone at the bottom
, she thought.
People. Anybody
.

A few more seconds and he would catch her. She fought back a sob and then, when it wouldn’t completely go away, turned it into a shout for help. She screamed as she ran, trying to get her voice above the endless bell, and her cry sounded deafening in the stairwell, but it bounced off walls that had heard many such cries for mercy over the centuries.

She pushed the thought away and tried to pick up her pace. She must almost be at the bottom. Just one more effort. She leapt farther than ever—too far—and missed her footing on the edge of the stair. Her ankle buckled and she fell hard down the rest of the steps, sprawling onto her back as she rolled out onto the stone flags of the basement chamber, a room of vaulted brick arches stuffed with artillery pieces.

The man in the trench coat loomed over her, pistol in hand, but it was only when someone spoke that she realized that they weren’t alone. The people she had been hoping to find were here after all, but it was instantly clear that they were not who she had expected, and when she started to sit up, she heard the unmistakable sound of weapons cocking: she froze, finding herself staring down the bayoneted barrels of half a dozen automatic rifles.

Deborah doubled up on the ground, her head squeezed into her chest, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands over her ears, trying to shut out the deafening volley of sound that would surely come next.

Nothing happened. Then the alarm bell stopped.

She could almost smell the tension, stiff in the air like electricity. The silence was total and as heavy as the cannonballs in the racks beside her. She opened her eyes and, very slowly, adjusted her position so that she could see what was happening.

The man in the trench coat was standing in the stairwell, arms raised above his head, his gun dangling by the trigger guard from one finger. As she watched he lowered it carefully, bending at the waist but keeping his eyes fixed on the other men. He set the gun down, kicked it gently sideways, then straightened up and put both hands on his head.

There were five men, two kneeling, all in navy-blue uniforms with a red stripe down the trouser, white belts, and berets with a red and white plume. But if their uniforms looked ceremonial and old-fashioned, their guns were absolutely contemporary: automatic rifles with knife-bayonets. Deborah opened her hands to show she had no weapon, and started, very slowly, to sit up.

Only then did she see the man who was not in uniform. He was wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt under a black leather jacket, and he was training an automatic pistol on the man in the stairwell. It was Nick Reese.

Deborah stared at him, openmouthed.

“You should have talked to me while you had the chance,” muttered the man who had said he was Kenneth Jones of the CIA.

“She’ll be perfectly safe with us,” said Nick.

“Of course she will,” said Jones. “Why wouldn’t she trust an archaeological photographer.”

“Step away from the gun,” said Nick.

“You’re going to be in serious trouble,” said the American.

“As are you,” said Nick. “You know how many laws you’ve broken in the last week, Kenneth? You’re meddling in things that aren’t any concern of you or your government.”