Finding North (28 page)

“
Why have you come?” Ben
asked.

He indicated to a
red-velvet, gilded, high-backed chair, and sat down in its
twin.

“
Dom asked us to look at
the bookstore,” Alex said and sat down next to him. “You probably
don’t remember, but Jesse and I used to go there all the time and
look at maps. Dom thinks the map I liked is still there. It may be
nothing, but because it was my link to the store, he thinks we need
to find it.”

“
They’ve stopped two arson
attempts,” Ben said.

“
That’s why Dom thinks
there’s something there,” Alex said. “He also wants a big show of
US military presence. He thinks that might shake something
loose.”

“
Anything’s possible,” Ben
said.

“
The bookstore owner’s
assistant will be there in the morning,” Alex said.

“
What’s her name?” Ben
asked.

“
Eloise Le Grande,” Alex
said. “Know her?”

Ben shook his
head.

“
I can’t believe it’s been
right there, in front of my nose . . .” Ben
said.

“
Yeah,” Alex said. “Like I
said, Jesse and I used to go there all the time. How is the
bookstore owner?”

“
Alive,” Ben said.
“Recovering. You were right about the poison.”

“
MJ,” Alex
said.

“
They gave him the
antidote in time,” Ben said. “He should make a full
recovery.”

“
Did he do it to himself?”
Alex asked.

“
He denies it,” Ben said.
“He had no idea how much trouble he was in, so I tend to believe
him.”

Alex nodded.

“
Why have you come?” Ben
asked. “Josh left after dinner. Your team is out enjoying a night
in Paris. And yet, you are here. Forgive me if I’m
suspicious.”

“
I have a few questions
for you,” Alex asked.

“
You can ask questions
anytime,” Ben said. “Why come all this way?”

“
They are important
questions,” Alex said. “Personal questions.”

Ben nodded. Alex fell
silent. After a few minutes, Ben got up and poured two glasses of
grande champagne cognac. Alex took the glass from him.

“
This vineyard will be
yours and Max’s one day,” Ben said.

“
Max is already setting
himself up as the overlord of brandy,” Alex said. “But I think
Helene wants in on the business.”

“
Do you see much of her?”
Ben asked as he sat down.

“
No,” Alex said. “With
school and her new boyfriend, she’s pretty busy. When I do see her,
she’s . . .”

Alex smiled.

“
Is there a word that
describes beautiful, happy, bubbly, mentally stimulated?” Alex
asked.

“
For you?” Ben grinned.
“‘
Coffee
.’”

“
It’s like a switch has
been turned on inside her,” Alex said. “She’s
blossoming.”

“
And you think it’s this
guy?” Ben asked.

Alex gave him a wry smile,
and Ben laughed.

“
Yes, in fact, I am aware
that my daughter will likely marry Fionn Drayson,” Ben
said.

Alex laughed.

“
I’m guessing you don’t
see much of him, either,” Ben said.

“
Between school and his
new girlfriend,” Alex smiled.

“
Yes,” Ben said. “Would
you mind if Helene joined you in the cognac business?”

“
She’s a joy,” Alex
shrugged. “Frederec is well on his way as a designer. You’ve
launched your first two children well.”

“
My first two?” Ben
smiled.

“
Second two?” Alex
laughed. “Four down, four to go?”

“
God, I have a lot of
children.”

He shook his head and
laughed. They sipped their cognac and watched the fire in
silence.

“
This line of cognac was
created to woo your grandmother,” Ben said and looked at his
glass.

“
It’s very good,” Alex
smiled and took a sip.

Ben nodded as if that were
obvious.

“
You’d better ask your
questions before we’re too tired or drunk to talk,” Ben
said.

Alex nodded. He gestured
for her to go ahead.

“
It’s occurred to us that
our mother, Rebecca, might have been induced to leave her husband,
and . . .” Alex stopped talking to let him fill in
the blanks. Ben blinked as he thought it through. He scowled.
“We’re wondering what you were working on at that time.”

Ben opened his mouth and
then closed it.

“
IVF was invented by the
US Navy,” Ben said.

“
They practiced primarily
on military wives stationed in and around Fort Bragg,” Alex said.
“Mostly by consent, but not always.”

“
You and Max
were . . .” Ben looked confused. “How?”

“
It’s possible that she
was given a kind of fertility drug,” Alex said. “Possibly something
similar to what I was given when they harvested my eggs for a
surrogate. At least half of my eggs had two X
chromosomes.”

Ben nodded. Alex watched
the fire for a while until he was ready to talk again.

“
When she became pregnant
by me, I would be required to marry her,” Ben said. “At the very
least. I’d have to leave the
agency . . .”

“
Would that have happened
if Dad hadn’t . . .?” Alex asked.

“
Oh, yes,” Ben
said.

“
Dad foiled their plan to
sideline you,” Alex said.

“
Worse than that,” Ben
said. “He befriended me. ‘If we’re going to have children in
common, we should at least be friends,’ he said. He’s a great
friend.”

“
Could that have been the
plan?” Alex asked.

“
No,” Ben said. “No way.
No one would have believed that the great Patrick Hargreaves would
raise another man’s children as his own. But then again, no one
really knows what he will or won’t do.”

“
Love’s never a factor
when considering someone else’s motives,” Alex said.

Ben nodded.

“
What were you working
on?” Alex asked.

Ben took a sip of cognac
to avoid the question for a moment. Unable to find a reason not to
tell her, he nodded.

“
I was working on the
other side of the equation you are working on,” Ben
said.

“
What does that mean?”
Alex asked.

“
You are looking into the
possibility of a group of individuals who want to see the world
burn for no other reason than to profit from the recovery,” Ben
said. “Correct?”

“
Sure,” Alex
said.

“
I was looking at the men
and women, families really, who fight them,” Ben said.

“
You know about the ‘watch
the world burn’ crowd?” Alex asked.

“
No,” Ben said.
“Yes.”

Ben shrugged and looked at
the fire for a long time. When Alex was sure she was going to
throttle him, he looked at her and nodded.

“
I know that look,” Ben
said. “I give it myself.”

Alex smiled.

“
I’m not holding out,” Ben
said. “What would be the point of that?”

“
I was just wondering that
myself.” Alex said.

She gave him an irritated
look, and he chuckled.

“
I’m trying to put all the
pieces together,” Ben said. “At the time, I didn’t know what I was
looking at. I had found a few old families who’d kept key pieces of
property in large cities. The Zenos, for example. They owned a
small farm just outside of the Dutch settlement of New York. The
farm became a workshop, and the workshop turned into a fashionable
Tribeca home now owned by Joshua Peretz’s NYPD partner Dex
Zeno.”

“
There are others?” Alex
asked.

“
Not a lot,” Ben said.
“Maybe twenty families worldwide. Maybe five.”

He shook his head and
shrugged. Alex nodded that she understood.

“
In the process of
discovering these properties, looking into the plans on file for
the renovations, I realized that these properties were more like
museums than homes,” Ben said. “At the time, everyone was hot on
the trail of Nazi sympathizers. I needed to be sure these museums
weren’t filled with Nazi loot.”

“
Were they?” Alex
asked.

“
No, but I didn’t know
that at the time,” Ben shook his head. “At the time, I thought I’d
stumbled upon a Nazi stash. It wasn’t until years later that I
learned that these bunkers are repositories of historical photos
and documents. They are a kind of catalog of human
existence.”

“
You’ve been inside Dex’s
basement?” Alex raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“
Not the Zeno estate,” Ben
said. “Another family. In China with Steve. Someone Fong worked
with. But at the time we’re talking about, I had no idea what I was
looking at.”

“
They seem to be
collecting clues as to when and where the world will burn again,”
Alex said. “From the boards, Dex appears to believe the next time
of upheaval will happen in the next year or so. We haven’t had a
chance to ask him because he’s been so ill.”

“
I never got that close,”
Ben said. “Everything happened with Rebecca, and I met your father
and . . . I was just starting to look at these
families. After meeting your father, I was assigned to something
else. I didn’t get back to it until . . . maybe ten
years later.”

“
If you’d just discovered
these families’ existence, is it safe to say that inducing Rebecca
to leave Fort Bragg didn’t have anything to do with this?” Alex
asked.

Ben looked at her for a
long moment, before his head went up and down.

“
What were you working on
when you discovered these old families?” Alex asked.

“
What was
I . . . uh . . .” Ben fell silent.
“Did you look it up?”

Alex gave a small
nod.

“
And?” Ben
asked.

“
You were in between
assignments,” Alex said. “You’d just left south-east Asia. Over the
next few years, you bounced all over the globe.”

Ben nodded.

“
Did something happen in
south-east Asia that . . .”

“
Philippe
died.”

The words popped out of
Ben. Alex was so surprised by his spontaneous words that she stared
at him. Ben’s eyes were filled with tears, and his head went up and
down. He glanced at Alex.

“
Philippe died,” Ben said.
“No one could have predicted that. No one.”

“
That was years
before . . .,” Alex said.

“
I met your mother when
Philippe died,” Ben said. “I flew home immediately. My mother
was . . . inconsolable. My father retreated into
cruelty. Dominic . . .”

Ben shook his
head.

“
Philippe’s suicide was
the worst thing that had ever happened to me,” Ben said. “You speak
of Helene blossoming. Philippe was always the brightest blossom on
any bush. He was everything light and good in this world. I’ve
never met anyone like him. And, in a moment, he was
gone.”

Ben’s hand smashed down on
the arm of his chair. His glass skidded off the small table between
them and crashed to the stone floor. Ben put his hand to his eyes
to cover his tears.

“
I’d been fighting tyranny
on the other side of the world,” Ben said. “I’d wanted to destroy
the evil in the world so that we could all live in light and
beauty . . . But here, at home, a beautiful, light
human being couldn’t exist along with people’s . . .
stupidity and fear. Blot out the light. Block out beauty. Focus on
our stupidity and we’ll get to heaven.”

“
You had an existential
crisis,” Alex said. “‘
The dark night of
the soul’
you’ve warned me
about.”

Ben gave her a hard
look.

“
Yes,” Ben said. “Why
bother with trying to end tyranny when the good Christian people of
Chicago prefer the dark?”

Ashamed by his own loss of
control, Ben looked away from her. Alex got up to clean up the
cognac and glass. The glass had shattered into tiny pieces on the
limestone floors. She mopped up the cognac with a towel she found
in the coffee cabinet and carefully picked up the shards of glass.
When she was done, she poured him another glass of cognac and sat
down.

“
I miss him.” Ben gave her
a look of gratitude. She smiled.

“
Mom says the same thing,”
Alex said.

“
He had this way of always
seeing the good,” Ben said. “He once told me, that when things
seemed the most bleak, he’d look for what was missing in his
perception and find the light. ‘The absence of dark is light,
Benji. It’s like the moment before dawn begins. You just can’t
perceive the light yet,’ he used to say.”

“
Doesn’t sound like a
person who’d kill himself,” Alex said.