The Keepers of the Library (17 page)

R
ob Melrose arrived at the Black Bull
Hotel in Kirkby Stephen and immediately went to Annie’s room. Brimming with public-schoolboy arrogance he barged in when she opened her door and began dressing her down.

“There’s a lot of displeasure in London,” he said with a toffy accent that made her clench in irritation. “A lot of displeasure. Will Piper is a bit of a hot potato politically speaking, and you let him give you the slip. Career-limiting move, Annie. Very disappointing. I’ve got two men waiting downstairs. Let’s get a move on, shall we?”

She was fully dressed but hadn’t yet put on her walking shoes. She purposely kept him waiting by sitting on her bed, slowly lacing and tightening. When she stood up, she said, “Look, Rob, my remit wasn’t to keep Piper on a leash. It was to offer assistance in the location of his son. He chose to run off. I don’t know why. But I am blameless.”

“I’m quite sure you’ll have an opportunity to assert your blamelessness when you file a report, but for now,
my
remit is to locate two missing persons: Piper and his son. You know who Piper’s wife is, don’t you?”

“Yes, Rob, I do,” Annie said wearily.

“Then you can imagine the shitstorm coming our way via the FBI and the State Department. My job is to find them today, and your job is to assist me in any way I deem appropriate. I suggest we find a quiet spot in the lounge and have you debrief us on all your activities in Kirkby Stephen and the surrounding environs.”

“Yes, why don’t we,” she said defiantly, grabbing her shoulder bag. He might not have noticed she was mocking him when she said, “I believe we should be especially mindful of the—surrounding environs.”

K
enney and his men rolled into Kirkby Stephen and parked their car just past the Black Bull. Kenney’s surveillance people back at Groom Lake had gotten a precise bead on Annie Locke’s location from her NetPen signal, and they’d been monitoring all her e-mail and telephone traffic, slicing through the MI5 encryption algorithms like a hot knife through butter. As Kenney liked to say in these situations: “We own her.” His watchers had never met a code they couldn’t break. It was what they did for a living. He was proud as hell of his people and their mission, but the end was nigh, as they say. He didn’t have the slightest idea what he’d do when Area 51 was decommissioned. Sometimes, when he was off duty with a skin of booze in his gut, he secretly hoped that when the Horizon came, he and the rest of humanity were cleanly wiped out. That way he wouldn’t have to settle for an inferior job.

But now, as he stretched his legs and checked out the geography of Market Street, he was mindful only of the job at hand. He was going to find Will Piper, find out what he and his son were up to, and
find out who the hell “the Librarians” were. And when he’d accomplished that, if there was any way he could legitimize his actions, he was going to seriously fuck up Mr. Piper. Sure, Piper was BTH, but he could still be hurt, and besides, putting the hammer down would take care of unfinished business. He owed it to Malcolm Frazier and the honor of the watchers. As he was delivering the beat-down, he’d be sure to let Piper know that each and every blow was coming from Malcolm, fists from the grave.

A
nnie sat at a snug table at the rear of the hotel lounge with Melrose and two other MI5 agents. She knew the men, good enough blokes, she reckoned, who must have shared her opinions of Melrose but were clams in the presence of their boss. The beer mats on the table oozed a nasty yeastiness. She stacked them and tossed them onto an empty table. Melrose had waved off the server, saying they were neither hungry nor thirsty, then remarked at the waiter’s scowl, “I do hate these provincial towns.”

Annie delivered a crisp rundown of the houses and farms at Pinn that she and Will had visited. She dwelled the longest on the Lightburn Farm because that was their most substantial encounter. Most of their other interviews had been brief and rather unfriendly.

“The people up here don’t seem to like outsiders,” she said.

“But that wasn’t the case at Lightburn Farm,” Melrose said nasally. He had a map on his NetPen screen with red pins at each of their interviews. “Pins on Pinn,” he had said, then waited for his toadies to
chuckle. “They weren’t unfriendly there, were they? What does that tell us, Annie?”

“As I concluded in my draft report, Rob, it indicated they were either a friendly lot or they were hiding something,” she said.

“Well, in either case, it seems we should pay them a visit this afternoon. Let’s see how friendly they are when the heavy mob descends on them.”

Just then, Kenney, Lopez, and Harper came into the lounge and asked to be seated for lunch. Kenney gave the MI5 table a good hard stare.

“Who the hell are that lot?” Melrose whispered.

“Never saw them before,” Annie said. “Americans by the look and sound of them.”

“Well, the tall one seems to recognize you. Did you see the way he looked at you?”

She shrugged.

“FBI?” Melrose whispered. “CIA? Other?”

“Want me to go ask?” she said sarcastically.

“Heavens no! Bad form. I’ll make some discreet inquiries. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t the machination of Piper’s wife to shadow our investigation.”

Across the room, Kenney was whispering to his people too. “Anne Katherine Locke. She looks just like her photo. Pretty little gal. Barely legal, if you ask me.”

“What’s our move, chief?” Lopez asked.

“Well, our first move is to pray to the Almighty Lord that there’s something on this menu that won’t turn our stomachs inside out. After that, we’ll do what we do best. We’ll follow their asses till they lead us to Piper.”

“I think they made us,” Harper said.

Kenney opened the menu. “What are they going to do? Outrun us in their dinky electric car?”

N
ancy wasn’t used to an empty house. It wasn’t so much the part of being alone. Will spent most of his time in Florida while she was in Washington, and Phillip didn’t exactly hang out with her. He stuck to his room most of the time. It was the quiet that got to her.

Phillip had a noisy presence. There was the constant thumping from the subwoofer in his bedroom. And his NetPen was perpetually chiming some kind of alert from Socco and his myriad Net sites. And he never turned the kitchen or living-room TVs off, so there was always a background of voices to squelch.

Now the house was as silent as a tomb, and she hated that.

She was dressed for work and filling her commuter mug with coffee when she began to cry. Her son was missing. Her husband was missing. And her hard-ass boss was asking her to put job and country first. It was too much.

She did what she had been doing obsessively—she voice-dialed Phillip’s phone, then Will’s, and got the same casual greeting messages that seemed so monstrously incongruous under the circumstances.

Next she checked her e-mails and found and reread the same one she’d picked up while still in bed. Ronald Moore, Deputy Director General of MI5 was reassuring her that everything was being done to locate Will and Phillip. One of their “best men” had been deployed into the field with a team to assist the younger case officer, Miss Locke. She could expect to receive regular updates.

Nancy had looked up the particulars on Annie Locke and had snarled at the pretty face on her screen, “Leave him alone, honey. He’s got a bad heart.” She
imagined that Miss Locke would have gotten Will’s old juices flowing the way pretty women always did. That rising sap of his had almost killed him at Christmas. But why had he taken her car and ditched her? He must have gotten onto something and didn’t want the baggage of a tyro tagging along. But why hadn’t he called to let her know what he had? Just a ten-second call!

Damn you, Will, she thought. You’re the most exasperating man I ever met. And by the way, I love you.

Director Parish found her the moment she arrived at the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Guess what, you were right,” he said, pouring them both coffees from a carafe on his conference table.

“Right about what?” Nancy asked.

“All of the diplomats who turned tail and flew back to Beijing are alive and well this morning.”

“I told you it didn’t fit.”

“And I already told you, you were right.”

“Then let me catch the next plane to the UK. I need to get over there and find my guys.”

“Ron Moore tells me they’ve got good people on it, Nancy. Here’s the situation. The Chinese aren’t cooling down. They don’t care that the last batch of postcards was a hoax. They believe—or they’re saying they believe—that they originated from the same organization that sent the real ones. They’re asserting they all came from Groom Lake. They’ve lodged a formal complaint with the State Department stating that the threat to their diplomats has taken the crisis to the next level, and they’re demanding to know why the administration is engaging in hostile provocation. As of this morning, they’ve started rattling sabers. They’ve deployed two Shi-Lang-class aircraft
carriers and a group of Type 094 nuclear attack subs into the South China Sea heading toward the Taiwan Straits. It wouldn’t surprise anyone at the Pentagon if they used this as a smoke screen for an invasion of Taiwan. The White House, needless to say, is tied up in knots. That’s where we come in. The best way to defang these guys is to prove the postcards did not originate from inside this government. It’s up to us to break this case, which means it’s up to you.”

Nancy sighed, the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders. She had packed a case for England but it would have to stay in her car trunk.

She took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she had carved out a suite of offices and conference rooms for the Chinese Doomsday task force. Throughout her career as a senior-level administrator she’d been a practitioner of centralizing complicated cases. That hadn’t always made her popular at the field-office level where Special Agents in Charge and their staffs often felt usurped by the long arm of Headquarters. But this case was a perfect example of the need for coordination. Postcards had been sent to New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now Washington. She couldn’t have each field office doing its own thing.

She had plucked a Special Agent from the New York office to come to Washington to lead the task force, aware that she saw a lot of herself in Andrea Markoff, a ten-year veteran of the FBI and a real pistol, always on a full burn and as smart as they came. Markoff was over the moon at being mentored by the highest-ranking woman in the Bureau and was ferociously loyal.

When Nancy stopped by the task-force conference room, Andrea scampered to her side.

“Any progress on the videos?” Nancy asked.

“Cracked it like an egg!” Andrea said. “The new software programs got finished last night, and it looks like they’re working.”

“Let’s take a look.”

Nancy’s mantra had long been: shoe-leather work breaks cases. She’d learned that working with Will on her first big case, and the lesson had been validated over and over throughout the years. The only hard evidence to latch onto were the postcards. All of them were postmarked in Manhattan and all passed through one of seven post-office branches. That meant the sender or senders had in all likelihood physically deposited the cards in several of the 167 street or central boxes that fed these branches.

It was easy enough to narrow down the days in question based on the postmarks on batches of cards and given the near-total blanket of CCTV coverage of Manhattan streets, there was good video for almost every box. The problem was the sheer volume of data. For any day in question, there were twenty-four hours of footage to review for some twenty street boxes or 480 hours of images to scrutinize looking for a recognizable face attached to a letter drop. And multiply that by the eight relevant days over the past two months that corresponded to each batch of postcards. The search for a common face or faces was a classic needle-in-a-haystack scenario.

Andrea’s idea was to get the geeks involved. With Nancy’s blessing, she created a posse of analysts to write code that would compress the videos and include only images where a person’s hand could be seen touching the handle of a postbox.

“It’s running now,” Andrea said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s weeding out 99 percent of the crap.”

An entire side of the conference room was covered by video screens. Andrea called up the January 8
video feeds, and the wall lit with the best angles for the twenty-one postboxes that fed the Village Post Office on Varick Street. “Run images,” she said.

A group of agents and techs in the conference room fell in behind Andrea and Nancy as the chopped-up time-stamped video feeds began playing back.

The algorithms seemed to be effective. The choppy videos were pretty much limited to images of people depositing letters into the boxes.

“This would have been even tougher ten years ago,” Andrea said. “I mean, when was the last time you mailed a letter?”

Nancy remembered. When Will was away from her in Florida, she liked to send him real cards, not e-ones. The last was a birthday card in November, something with a sailboat and a sunset. She pushed it out of her mind—she didn’t want to get teary in front of her people.

It must have been a bitterly cold day because many of the people on the videos were wearing scarves and hats. “I’d say there’s only going to be a 50-percent hit rate for facial IDs,” Nancy said.

“If we’re lucky,” Andrea said. “But at least we’ve got time-shrunk material to work with.”

Nancy’s NetPen vibrated. She popped an earpiece in and stepped to the back of the room to take the call.

It was Ron Moore from MI5. She braced herself when Moore’s assistant announced he was coming onto the line. But the call turned out to be an empty piece of courtesy. He was merely informing her that his London team had arrived on the scene in Yorkshire and was going to be deploying into the field shortly. They had a number of leads which they were going to investigate methodically. “Is there anything
else I can do for you, Nancy?” he asked by way of signing off.