Valhalla (15 page)

He stepped out into the corridor and listened for movement from the first floor. Apart from the wail of the wind, there was none. When he returned to the conference room, Lexy was dressed and gazing down at the body of the little agent.

“Thank you, Eamon,” she said.

Macaulay's mind raced. By now he had hoped to be lying in a Jacuzzi with a Jack Daniel's in his hand and looking forward to a good night's sleep. Instead, there were two federal agents lying dead at their feet. It was all too big, too complicated to begin to figure it out.

He opened Langdon's briefcase and pulled out his federal credentials.

“If these aren't forged,” he said, “and I doubt they are, this guy worked directly for the president. If the White House is part of this thing, whatever this thing is, who knows how far the tentacles go? One thing is for sure—whoever sent him won't hesitate to send a replacement.”

“If we don't stay here to tell our side of the story, they will think we murdered them,” said Lexy.

“If we stay here, we may end up telling our story to another executioner,” he replied, glancing around the room. “Anyway, a good team of homicide investigators should be able to reconstruct what happened here. And they'll have the video.”

“But he turned it off before he showed us the photographs and shot Eamon.”

“No one looking at those interviews will believe we had murderous intentions.”

“How can you trust whoever gets here first not to destroy them?” asked Lexy.

“You're right,” he conceded, his exhausted mind reeling. “The only thing we can do at this point is go to ground until we can find out who we can trust.”

“Go where?” asked Lexy.

“One burning building at a time,” said Macaulay, removing the disk drive from the video recorder and putting it in Langdon's briefcase along with the sheaf of photographs still lying on the conference table and his federal credentials.

Lexy noticed that Langdon's iPad had fallen to the floor. She picked it up.

“We should take this too,” she said. “Maybe there's something on it that will explain what's behind this.”

While she added it to the briefcase, Macaulay went over to the bodies and pulled out their wallets. Langdon had sixty dollars and the little agent ten. He took the cash and put their wallets back where he found them.

“We'll leave everything else as it is,” said Macaulay.

“Our fingerprints are on those guns,” said Lexy.

“And everywhere else too,” he said, turning out the lights behind them.

When they reached the first floor, Macaulay saw that the staircase kept going down to a subbasement. Following it, they came to two intersecting corridors, one leading to a series of underground offices, and a second that led into darkness.

Macaulay produced the flashlight from his pocket, and they continued along the second corridor for another hundred feet until arriving at another set of concrete stairs that led up to a steel door with a self-locking security bar. Macaulay opened the door and stepped into what appeared to be a small emergency power plant. Two large diesel generators sat in the center of the room.

“These probably provide backup power to the terminal,” said Macaulay.

Wind-driven snow was lashing the windows. Looking outside, he couldn't see any sign of the police cordon, but he assumed they still surrounded the general aviation terminal.

The small building backed up to the long-term parking facility, and that gave him an idea. Picking up a flatiron bar from the workbench along the far wall, he said, “Wait here.”

Forcing open the exterior door, he stepped outside and let it slam shut behind him. Walking quickly across the parking lot, he scanned the first row of cars and trucks. All of them were buried by more than a foot of snow.

A Ford Ranger pickup in the second row had less than three inches on it. Macaulay assumed that if the owner had just left the vehicle in the long-term lot, there was a good chance he wasn't coming back right away.

Using the bar, he smashed a small hole in the rear window on the driver's side and reached inside to unlock the door. Climbing in, he shined his flashlight on the ignition switch.

It was no challenge to hot-wire the ignition. Long before he fell in love with fighter jets, Macaulay's passion had been working on fast cars. Using his jackknife, he pried the plastic cover panel off the ignition tumbler.

It was a standard assembly with five wires clipped to the rear of the tumbler. He pulled loose the red power wire and the brown starter wire. As soon as he connected them, the engine surged to life.

Macaulay turned the heat up to maximum and headed back for Lexy. Five minutes later, they were driving toward the exit. No one was working the tollbooth, and the security barrier was raised to the open position to allow access for the snowplows. Macaulay saw that the surveillance camera on the roof of the kiosk was covered with snow.

“We're lucky,” he said. “At least they won't know how or when we left. We have a good chance to cover a lot of ground before daylight.”

He turned the truck onto Route 95, and they headed south into the storm.

1 December
The Bowers
Catoctin Mountain
Leesburg, Virginia

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Everett Somervell IV (ret.) sat dozing in the leather recliner in his walnut-paneled study. Waking up, he glanced through the window at the snowy landscape. In the pale light of dawn, he saw the three-legged doe and her new fawn munching acorns under the white oak tree.

It gave him pleasure to know that she had survived another year in the realm of the weekend gunslingers. These days, anything that moved on the mountain during open season was at risk of being shot down.

He no longer slept through the night. He rarely enjoyed anything approaching real slumber at any time of the day or night. He needed just a few hours of dozing to function.

Picking up his personal iPad, he resumed his perusal of the Web site. It was quite amazing to him how much new material was added to it in each twenty-four-hour cycle, literally hundreds of new leads to research and explore.

His cell phone began to ring and he picked it up.

“This is Meg.”

He could hear the irritation in her voice.

“The deputy director would like to see you in his office at ten o'clock.”

“I'll be there,” he said, hanging up.

He was grateful to still have his hand in after the wholesale housecleaning of the covert-operations branch in the previous year. Old and venerable went out. Young and bold came in. Although he was now relegated to a tiny basement office in the CIA library annex, a week rarely went by that he wasn't consulted on an intelligence matter that required someone with an institutional memory.

The thirty-something Meg had replaced him in his seat at covert operations. Overly ambitious to make her mark, she was obviously irked that he still had access to those at the top.

His fingers moved smoothly over the iPad keys like darting extensions of his nervous system. He usually spent at least an hour on the same site, punching the familiar icons of the search engine, hunting for an ideal candidate.

The wainscoted wall of his study was covered with photographs that documented his long journey from Exeter to Yale, his years as an air force fighter pilot, five more in the Pentagon, a decade of service at the agency, and the final ascendancy to wise man status.

At sixty-four, he looked like a rugged version of Tennessee Williams, with a shock of white hair, a long narrow nose, and a sprinkling of liver spots on his cheeks from exposure to the desert and tropical sun. He still wore the same seersucker suits that were his personal trademark, regardless of the season or the continent.

Over the years, he had served at some of the agency's angriest hot spots—Beirut, Athens, Moscow, Baghdad, and Beijing. Along the way, he had had one lung removed after a three-pack-a-day habit, and absorbed a dozen shards of shrapnel from a bombing attack in Libya. Now he was in the proverbial pasture.

It gave him plenty of time for his favorite pastime of savoring the Internet smorgasbord of beautiful young men from all over the world. After two broken marriages and countless liaisons across the globe, he found that the Internet provided all the excitement he needed in his personal life. It was so much better than the sweaty reality and residual guilt from incidents like the sordid mess in Beirut that had almost cost him his career. Now he could have his pleasure through the virtual reality of the computer screen.

The cell phone began to ring again. He picked it up.

“Tommy?”

He had an ear for voices. This one was air force; the first, Gulf War.

“Dear boy, I told you to never call me here,” said Somervell, chuckling. “People will talk.”

“They have been for the last twenty years,” said Steve Macaulay, “which is why I'm amazed you're still there.”

“The agency is well aware of my proclivities,” said Somervell. “They've put them to good use in the name of God and country.”

“I never asked. You didn't tell,” said Macaulay.

“You were a stalwart in those days,” said Somervell, “even if you didn't return my feelings of genuine passionate love.”

Macaulay glanced up from the pay phone at the rest stop on the Maine Turnpike as a burly young man in a Patriots NFL jersey came through the entrance door, carrying a toddler in his arms. He went into the men's room without glancing at him.

“I need your help, Tommy,” said Macaulay.

“Name it,” said Somervell.

“I'm probably being hunted for two murders,” said Macaulay. “At least that would be the cover story. It was self-defense.”

“Who is after you?”

“Half of spook land.”

“What have you done, dear boy?”

“We . . . I killed a senior agent on the president's domestic antiterrorism task force. An FBI field agent was also shot.”

“That's not good.”

“The senior agent was about to kill me, and he was clearly following orders that came from somebody higher up the food chain.”

“How high?”

“There's got to be a mole in the White House national security team,” said Macaulay, “and maybe more than one. Somebody needs to find out. I don't know who else to call. Are you still in covert operations?”

Somervell glanced down at the iPad screen. A slender young Pakistani was busy entertaining a fellow student at an English university.

“More or less,” he answered.

“This rogue agent's name was James Langdon—ex-army if that helps. He was after a photo memory card I brought back from Greenland with an old Viking inscription that might contain the location of Leif Eriksson's burial tomb.”

“You're losing me, Steven.”

“I know it sounds crazy. Langdon was part of a Norse religion called the Ancient Way. Apparently they look at Leif Eriksson as some kind of god.”

“I crossed paths with a few of them in Paris some years ago . . . tough boys . . . serious about their work.”

“They wiped out our whole expedition up in Greenland. John Lee is dead too.”

Lexy came out of the ladies' room and walked over to him.

“Oh my,” said Somervell sadly. “I always saw him as indestructible.”

“One more thing. I believe they have a warship of some kind. A serious warship.”

“How serious?”

“Serious enough to be equipped with attack helicopters.”

Macaulay turned around again as a state police officer wearing a
SMOKEY THE BEAR
hat entered the rest stop and walked over to a vending machine. Inserting a dollar bill, he waited for the coffee to pour.

“I've got to go,” said Macaulay.

“With regard to our mole, do you have any insights into gender, background, whatever?”

“No idea,” said Macaulay, cupping his hand over the phone. “Whoever it is has a pass into the White House basement.”

“I will try to help,” said Somervell. “Discreetly, of course. How can I reach you?”

“No idea for now.”

“Call me back tonight if you can,” said Somervell. “I'll give you a rundown on what I find out.”

“Who was that?” asked Lexy when they were back in the stolen truck.

“A friend at Langley who can help us find out who is involved in the White House,” said Macaulay. “I worked with him in the Pentagon. He knows the turf down there. Right now we need a place to hole up for a while.”

“I've been thinking about it,” said Lexy. “I know where we can go.”

Tommy Somervell reluctantly terminated the page on the Web site he had been surfing and took the time to erase his recent browsing history. Picking up his secure phone, he placed a call.

“This is Tommy,” he said. “Are you awake, dear girl?”

“What do you think?” came back the irritated voice.

“Are you still tracking violent religious organizations?”

30 November
Brattle Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Barnaby Finchem came up out of the depths and parted one eyelid.

Towanda, the female cat bestowed on him by his second wife, was curled up on the bed between him and Delia Glantz, one of the doctoral candidates in archaeology he was mentoring at the university.

The now twenty-two-year-old Towanda was the last in the menagerie of animals that had passed through his life since he had emigrated from England to join the faculty at Harvard. All three of his wives had been fond of pets, including horses, dogs, cats, turtles, clams, exotic fish, potbellied pigs, Hereford calves, and one llama.

Towanda had won a place in his cynical heart after she and her sister had been tied inside a canvas bag and tossed by their former owner into the deep tidal pond near his summer cottage on Cape Cod.

Barnaby and his second wife, Barbara, had been returning home across the dunes from a dinner party, when she heard them crying in distress. A moment later, she was diving into the water in her cocktail dress to save them.

Upon bringing the kittens home, Barbara had promptly named them Idgie and Towanda after two characters in her then-favorite novel,
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
. Some years later, Idgie had disappeared on her nightly walkabout. Towanda was still going strong.

Across the bedcovers, Barnaby contemplated the exquisite symmetry of Delia's naked breasts. She was an incredibly ardent lover, even if her half-written thesis on the nomadic pastoralists in the Sumerian city of Eridu during the Uruk period suffered from a distinct lack of imagination or original research. She more than made up for it in bed.

Barnaby had ceased to care whether his students bedded him for his brains or his marking pen. At the age of sixty-eight, he was just grateful to wake up next to a comely young woman like this and not have to worry about paying her alimony. He was never meant for the holy sacrament of marriage.

He had always adhered to a strict policy of never attempting to seduce any of his students. On the other hand, if one of them attempted to seduce him, and she was appealing enough, his defenses could be rapidly breached.

Even approaching seventy, Barnaby found his juices were still flowing in every way, although his recent heart bypass surgery had put a dent in his robust libido. Regardless, he vowed to never indulge in the potency pills so many of his colleagues resorted to in order to satisfy their wives and girlfriends.

He turned onto his back and stretched his massive six-and-a-half-foot-long frame. It was an unalloyed joy to again be able to wake in the morning without feeling any pain. The stroke had shaken him to the core. After a previous physical, the doctor had told him that his good cholesterol level was the highest he had ever seen, and that his death wouldn't be from heart disease. Barnaby had the stroke two weeks later, followed by open-heart surgery.

He now taught only one course at Harvard, the Origins of Civilization lecture series, and the waiting list to take it was hundreds long. The class required only three hours of his time every Monday morning, allowing him the rest of the week to concentrate on his other passion in life besides sex, the study of the rune language.

After achieving first class honors at Cambridge, the Englishman had spent nearly four decades crisscrossing Europe in an obsessive hunt to track down buried, stolen, and lost rune stones and etchings to add to his fund of knowledge, and he was now close to completing the thousand-page manuscript that comprehensively catalogued the language's evolution through the centuries.

Although he knew that early morning had arrived, it was still dark outside. He could hear rain hammering the windows, and it felt good to be there with Delia, warm and sexually spent under the goose down comforter.

The telephone in his study began to ring.

Barnaby always kept its volume on the minimum setting. Delia probably couldn't hear it over the rain, but the relentless ringing began to irritate him. There was no message machine on the line because the number was known to only a handful of people. After two minutes, he sensed that whoever was calling would not be deterred.

Planning to verbally flay whoever it was, he climbed out of the bed and walked naked to his paneled study. As he picked up the receiver, he looked out the window overlooking Harvard Square. Under the force of the sleeting rain, the sidewalks and streets were empty.

The voice on the other end of the line was excited and upset. He thought it might be his third ex-wife, Bonita, calling about his missing alimony payments, until the voice said, “Barnaby, it's Alexandra.”

He knew only one Alexandra. The Alexandra.

“Are you there?” she demanded in the same smoky voice he remembered so well.

“Alexandra, it's barely morning,” he growled, “and I'm still recovering from the stroke from hell.”

“I need your help, Barnaby,” she said. “I'm on the run.”

“On the run,” he said caustically. “I seem to recall that line from
High Sierra
—Ida Lupino says . . .”

“It has to do with the Greenland expedition you recommended me for,” she said. “They're all dead.”

Barnaby remembered now.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“We're in front of the yogurt bar down the block from you.”

So she wasn't alone. He could see the café's lights from the study window.

“Give me ten minutes,” he said.

Barnaby went back to the bedroom and gently woke Delia Glantz.

“Something's come up,” he said. “An old friend of mine is in trouble.”

He could tell she was upset because she kept staring at him stone-faced while she put on her clothes. He had faced similar scenes many times. There was no point in telling her it was simply a matter of friendship and responsibility. He waited for her to tell him he was a heartless son of a bitch.

Instead, she stood at the door with tears in her eyes and said, “You're the most wonderful teacher I've ever known, Dr. Finchem.”

He was immediately tempted to tell her to take her clothes off again and get back in bed, but it was too late. When she left, he went over to the window to look down at the street.

Two figures were walking quickly up Brattle from the corner of Church Street. One was Alexandra. The other was a man. He had one arm around her in a protective way. In his other hand, he was carrying a briefcase. Barnaby padded to the bathroom and began running hot water into his oversized enamel tub.

As the tub filled, his mind traveled back to the time he had mentored Alexandra. From the start, he had known she was a remarkable student, deeply motivated and eager to make her mark in Norse studies, a field most people in the archaeological world viewed as a dead end.

She eventually became the finest runologist he had ever trained, with a natural, almost instinctive gift for translating the dead language from every period. Almost as good as he was. He had called her the code breaker.

His only disappointment with her stemmed from the fact that in the years she studied under him, she showed no interest in him sexually. At one point, he considered straying from his policy of never pursuing a student, but in the end restrained himself, sure she would rebuff him if he tried.

Their relationship had remained one of maestro and acolyte.

Barnaby waited by the study window until they arrived at the stone staircase of his brownstone and stepped under the portico to push the intercom button over his mailbox.

He pressed the button that delivered an electronic signal to unlock the front door. A few moments later, he heard them climbing past the second-floor landing on their way to the top floor. He opened the apartment door as they arrived. In the light of the stairwell lamp, the man's eyes were wary and distrustful.

Even drenched to the skin, Alexandra was as lovely as he remembered, more beautiful now that she was in her thirties and her active lifestyle had added character lines to her face. At the same time, she was much thinner than he remembered, and skin was peeling from her nose as she came into his welcoming arms.

As he watched them embrace, Macaulay took an immediate dislike to the man.

Barnaby led them into the living room and the cheerful fire he had set in the grate the night before. After he had stoked it with another log, Alexandra introduced the man as Steven Macaulay.

To Barnaby, he looked ex-military but not unintelligent, probably in his late forties, with the rugged, angular handsomeness of the old generation of Hollywood's leading men like Gregory Peck. It was clear that Macaulay had the love light in his eyes each time he looked at Alexandra.

“How did you get here?” Barnaby asked.

“I stole a truck in the long-term parking lot at Bangor Airport, and we left it at the long-term lot at Logan,” said Macaulay. “We took a taxi from there to Harvard Square.”

“Very resourceful,” said Barnaby.

Macaulay wasn't prepared for the sheer magnitude of the older man. Macaulay was six feet tall, and the man towered over him. Broad and deep-chested, he had a leonine pelt of gray hair that ran halfway down his back. His high-crowned nose looked like it had been broken more than once, and it was crisscrossed with fine, reddish veins. He was dressed in a tentlike flannel nightshirt.

Barnaby walked to a walnut cupboard and pulled out a bottle. Uncorking it, he poured stiff drinks into two water glasses and said, “Drink this.”

Lexy drank hers in one long swallow, remembering the fiery warmth of it from past ceremonial occasions with Barnaby.

“Calvados,” she said to Macaulay. “Apple brandy from Normandy.”

“You need to get out of those wet clothes,” said Barnaby. “I'm running a hot bath and will try to find some spare things for you while yours are in the dryer.”

After all his years in the air force, Macaulay had a good feel for accents. The old man's voice was intrinsically English and highborn. He heard the faint echo of the arrogant ruling class.

Fifteen minutes later, they joined Barnaby back in the galley kitchen. Lexy was wrapped in a gargantuan terry cloth bathrobe, and Macaulay was swimming inside one of his nightshirts.

Barnaby had already brewed a pot of coffee, and he was now scrambling a half dozen eggs in a large skillet. The smell of the food reminded Macaulay that they hadn't eaten anything since the FBI agent had given them the lobster rolls.

“So why are you on the run?” asked Barnaby, pouring the coffee.

Macaulay started with what happened to them after their arrival at the Bangor airport. When he finished the brief account, Barnaby said, “And you're sure this man Langdon was an agent of the White House antiterrorism task force?”

Macaulay retrieved Langdon's briefcase from the living room and opened it.

“Here are his credentials,” said Macaulay, “and here are the photographs he showed us. This disc is a recording of our statements in which we told him everything that happened to the Hancock expedition up on the ice cap.”

Macaulay held off telling the old man about Falconer's memory card.

“Instead of repeating the story again, just give me the disc and the photographs,” said Barnaby. “While you're having breakfast, I'll watch the interview.”

Taking his coffee, Barnaby went into his study and shut the door behind him.

“Why didn't you tell him about the memory card?” asked Lexy.

“Because I no longer know who we can trust,” said Macaulay.

“You can trust Barnaby,” she said fervently. “And we're going to need him to translate the markings that are hopefully recorded on the card.”

“We'll see,” he said.

Finishing his meal, Macaulay strolled around the apartment, trying to get a better sense of the man. Obviously, Lexy believed in him blindly, but that could simply be a product of past hero worship. Or maybe even more.

The apartment felt like a bachelor's lair with its blond Scandinavian furniture, interior window shutters instead of curtains, oil paintings of sailing ships. Books filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the living room. After scanning the titles, he found it odd that none of them related to the study of the Norsemen, which was supposedly the old man's livelihood.

Wandering back into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and saw it was loaded with red meat, brown eggs, wine, Cuban cigars, and imported beer; this also seemed strange for a man supposedly recovering from open-heart surgery.

Barnaby reentered the kitchen to see Macaulay examining the contents of his refrigerator. There was a look of detached amusement in his eyes as he divined the younger man's thoughts.

“We only go through this existence once,” he said, “and I don't plan to spend mine eating seaweed and low-fat granola.”

Barnaby led them back into the living room and stretched out on the sofa. Lexy and Macaulay took seats in the club chairs facing him.

“We're dealing with the ancient curse,” said Barnaby, his slate gray eyes looking to Macaulay like great nail heads in the reflected glow of the fire.