The Overseer (10 page)

“That’s putting it mildly.” He placed his glass on the bureau. “If you recall, I do theory, Ms. Trent.”

“Yes, I—”

“I sit in my nice little office, read lots of books and articles, and then I write about it. That’s it. I don’t do anything that might warrant an attack,
professional
or not. I suppose I expect someone else to see how the theories pan out.” He stopped. “Which raises a very interesting question. Who exactly are you?”

“What?”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but the little I know about State, especially its research branch, has nothing to do with dark alleys or professional assailants. You’re like … academics. You don’t get involved.”

“I’m aware of that.” She paused and looked over at him.

“Meaning …”

“I’m involved. So are you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I might be able to figure out
why
if I knew what Eisenreich meant.”

“I see.” He waited for more; when none came, he continued. “Look, I’m happy to talk about Eisenreich. That’s why I came. But I’d prefer to know if I’m dealing with the CIA or the FBI or whatever acronym is the most popular these days—”

“You’re dealing with me,” she said.

“That’s cryptic.”

“No, it’s safer.” She stared at him. “Eisenreich, Professor. How does it tie in to Washington?”

He returned the stare, trying to maintain his edge. After half a minute without success, he let out a long breath, then shook his head. “All right.” He sat back. “Eisenreich. Not an it. A
he
. Swiss monk. Died about four hundred and fifty years ago under some rather unpleasant circumstances—”

“A
monk
? How does a monk—”

“Because of a treatise he wrote on political power.”

Now Sarah shook her head. “A book is supposed to explain what happened today? Forgive me, Professor, but how dangerous—”

“Could a manuscript be?” He leaned toward her. “It’s never the document itself, Ms. Trent. It’s how people use it. Remember Machiavelli? As long as they trust its message, a piece of theory can create all sorts of trouble. If you need further proof, you can always flip to another station.”

“You’re telling me a manuscript did
that
?” she said, pointing to the screen. “That’s sabotage on a very sophisticated level, Professor. We’re talking about computer manipulation, high-tech explosives, acts of terrorism no sixteenth-century
theorist
could possibly have understood.”

“He didn’t have to understand—”

“A major U.S. city is on the verge of declaring a state of emergency. I find it hard to believe that a manuscript could be responsible.”

“Don’t. Peter the Great kept a copy of a book by a man named Pufendorf by his bedside. Wrote in his diary that it was the key to every political decision he made. Charles the Fifth had Marcus Aurelius. Cromwell, Hobbes. And Luther’s ninety-five theses have kept Rome on edge for the last four hundred years. Remember, these people didn’t have television or radio; Oprah didn’t tell them which books to read. So they had to find their own guideposts. Those who couldn’t read found theirs in the church; those who could found theirs in books; and those who sought power found theirs in a specific type of manuscript, a few of which have provoked some of the darker moments in history.” He placed the remote on the set. “Can you tell me who invented television, Ms. Trent?” Sarah shook her head. “Exactly. But we all remember Guttenburg and his printing press.”

“Then why this book?”

“Because it was supposed to make the Medici masters of Europe. Machiavelli had offered them only Florence.” He seemed suddenly struck by something. Almost to himself, he said, “One city wasn’t enough.”

She watched as his eyes continued to wander. “Why ‘supposed’?”

It took him a moment to regain focus. “What? Oh. Because … we’re not sure it exists.”

“
What
?” Her head snapped forward. “He never
wrote
it?”

“We don’t know. There’s a lot of … speculation.”

“Then speculate.”

W
OLF
P
OINT,
M
ONTANA,
F
EBRUARY
26, 8:42
P.M.
Laurence Sedgewick stood on the veranda, his hands resting on the rail, the night hovering just below zero. He enjoyed the cold, his eyes tightening at the sudden gusts from across the open field. A shock of white hair—somewhat premature for a man only in his mid-fifties—lent an added distinction to a face that tended to draw stares for its extraordinary good looks: the high cheekbones, the supple lips, the gentle smile that seemed always to grace them.

Sedgewick checked his watch. The last car had been due ten minutes ago.

The sight of headlights bouncing through the woods allayed his concerns. Within a minute, the car appeared at the gate, its exhaust swirling in a gray cloud along the dirt path. As it pulled up, Sedgewick moved to the steps.

“Why the delay, Ms. Grant?” No greeting. No words to acknowledge a job well done.

“Turbulence” was her equally curt response. She waited for him to press further. When he merely nodded, she moved past him and into the house. The two young men followed. Inside, all three placed their bags and coats in a hall closet and stepped through the archway to the living room. A fire was at full blaze, the old man at its side, stoking in herky-jerky movements.

“I trust you had an easy trip.” He thrust one last time at the wood, watched as the flame burst toward the flue, and then turned. “The car—what happened with Mr. Eggart’s car? Why was it not in place?”

All three looked at one another, then at him. Janet Grant spoke. “It was on … Thirteenth. He never showed up.”

“Yes, I understand that.” He moved to the chair nearest the fire and sat. “I am simply asking a question.”

“Did you know he’d been compromised?” Sedgewick appeared at the arch.

“Only … once we were in the air,” she replied.

“But you were instructed to maintain radio silence.” The old man spoke with little emotion. “How, then, could you have heard?” The woman did not answer. “I suspect that you failed to do as you were told because you were aware of your
earlier
mistake on
Twelfth
Street. Am I not correct, Ms. Grant?”

She kept her gaze straight ahead. “Yes.”

“At last we have the truth.” He stared into the fire. “Such a mistake can be costly. And, of course, there is always the matter of rectifying it.”

“I understand—”

“You understand very little. Otherwise, this situation would never have arisen.” The cold directness of the old man’s response caught her off guard. He turned to her. “Your father has accepted the responsibility for your actions. He has always understood the process, the role he must play.” He paused. “Do
you
understand that process, Ms. Grant?” Again he waited. “I trust that is something you will think about.”

The young woman stood motionless, unable to answer.

 

“Fifteen thirty-one.” The tale of the monk seemed to be calming Xander. “When the Medici resumed control of Florence, Eisenreich sent some excerpts of his manuscript as a gift to the returning conquerors. Much like Machiavelli twenty years earlier, he was looking for a job. In the pages he sent, so we’re led to believe, he hinted at a method by which a few men—naturally, the Medici—could seize power not only in one city but on the entire continent. And not simply through military aggression. In that mess on the bed is a copy from the papal archives of a letter that Clement the Seventh sent to several of his cardinals at the time. Clement—who happened to be a Medici—describes the little he saw of the treatise as
‘un lavoro d’una possibilita grande ma anche perigliso,
’ ‘a work of great but dangerous possibility.’ More frightened than intrigued, Clement wanted the manuscript found and burned. Had he been a bit bolder, who knows what the map of Europe might look like today?”

“But why wouldn’t the Pope have wanted to increase his own power?”

“To where? He was the head of the Catholic church, the largest source of social and political control in the known world, and he held the ultimate trump card. He was the Vicar of Christ. Excommunication was still a pretty potent weapon. He had all the power he could probably fathom. What he didn’t need was one of his rivals—most likely Henry in England or Francis in France—to get hold of the document and threaten European stability.”

“So Clement destroyed it?”

“That’s the great irony. He found Eisenreich—or rather, his bastard son, Alessandro, Duke of Florence, found him—but tortured the old monk to death before he got any information about the whereabouts of the document. Clement probably spent some very uncomfortable weeks waiting for the manuscript to emerge in some other court, but nothing ever showed up.”

“So it didn’t cause any problems.”

“For Clement, no. The manuscript never appeared. In fact, in a letter written to Alessandro about two months after Eisenreich’s death, the Pope was already convinced that the whole thing had been a ruse—that no manuscript had actually existed, and that Eisenreich had created the threat just so that someone would give him a job.”

“And so the whole episode was just forgotten?”

“If you think about it, in the early 1530s, Clement didn’t have the time to dwell on the Eisenreich document. Henry the Eighth’s split with the Catholic church was far more pressing than a hypothetical manuscript by a dead man.”

“But it does reappear?” asked Sarah, picking out the copies of the Pope’s correspondence from the pile. “Eisenreich
did
write the manuscript.”

“Yes and no.”

She stopped. “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”

“No proof, no manuscript. That’s what most scholars believe.”

“That’s the
no
. What’s the
yes
?”

“The
myth
of Eisenreich,” he explained. Sarah shook her head. “Over the past few centuries, Eisenreich’s name has turned up in letters, documents, even in notes on the side of a page, and always during periods of political upheaval. During the Thirty Years War, an entire treatise appeared:
Die
Wissenschaft des Eisenreichs—The Science of Eisenreich
. Cute, but not all that coherent. Our monk pops up during the English Protectorate, the French Revolution, even into this century and the early stages of the Third Reich.”

“So what, exactly, did they all think he had to tell them?”

“As far as we know, when and how to create chaos. Assassinations, the burning of grain reserves, destruction of ports. Sound familiar?”

“And you think the book could actually plot out—”

“It’s not what I think that matters. You asked what the manuscript was supposed to tell them. Evidently, it’s done a pretty good job. The problem is, no one has ever taken the references seriously.”

“Why? Because the chaos never played out?”

“That, and because most academics believe that the very idea of the myth itself has been weapon enough.”

Sarah looked up. “I don’t follow.”

“Think about it. If you want to consolidate your forces and make certain they have a common goal, what’s the easiest way to bring them together?”

“A common enemy,” she answered.

“Exactly. A threat that forces them to fight as one unit. Then, suppose you discover some old story about a manuscript that calls for, say, a severe restriction on individual liberty, a dismantling of the current market infrastructure, and so forth—and convince your compatriots that there’s actually a group ready to impose those measures on the state. What do your followers do? They snap to attention so as to destroy the threat. And in the process, they destroy all opposition.”

“And that’s what Eisenreich has been?” asked Sarah. “A fictional device used by some savvy politicians to eliminate opposition?”

“That’s what a number of historians believe. Even the name raises questions. In German, the word
Eisenreich
means ‘
iron state,’
or
‘iron regime
.’ The coincidence is … too good to be true.”