Finding North (6 page)

Alex shrugged.

“
He must have written
something on your map, Alex,” Vince said.

“
He thinks I’m dead,” Alex
said.

“
Maybe he thinks someone
else is watching,” Raz said.

“
Who?” Alex
asked.

“
One or both of your
fathers,” said US Marine Sergeant Michael J. “MJ” Scully, the
team’s personnel medic. The team turned to look at him. MJ had a
traumatic brain injury, which meant he usually didn’t speak in
meetings. He shrugged and gave a sly smile. “Just popped into my
head.”

“
Who else?” Joseph asked.
“Who do we know who also loves maps?”

“
Max?” Alex
shrugged.

“
I hate to point out the
obvious, but this guy was terrified of someone,” Leena said. “What
if he’s in intelligence?”

“
You mean, what if the guy
who wanted the book
was
watching?” Alex nodded.

“
Oh, that’s creepy,”
Matthew said.

“
I’ll get the names of
everyone who was invited to watch,” Sergeant Dusty said.

Joseph’s cell phone rang,
and he answered it.

“
Yes, sir,” Joseph said.
“I’ll tell her.”

“
Well?” Troy
asked.

“
He’s not dead,” Joseph
said. “Unconscious. Looks like a massive heart attack. Dominic
thinks they can keep him medically alive, but we probably won’t get
much else from him — that is if he survives the infirmary or
hospital. Dominic is sending a team to guard him,
but . . .”

“
Shit,” Alex said. “We
were so close.”

“
They had a team going
through his bookstore and records,” Raz said. “But someone’s beat
them to it. The store has been torn apart. His computers are wiped
clean. They couldn’t find his written records.”

“
Let’s get X on it,” Alex
said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and the bookstore computers
are backed up somewhere on the Internet.”

“
You think that’s wise
when . . .” Matthew started.

“
X” was the nickname of a
Belgian computer hacker turned security expert. Yvonne was the love
of his life. He hadn’t recovered from her death.

“
He’d like to be involved
in any way he can,” Alex said. “This is something he can
do.”

“
I’ll call him,” Joseph
said.

“
So, what do we have?”
Matthew asked the team.

“
The guy sold every copy
of
The Gadfly
to
some mystery buyer,” Margaret said.

“
Someone he was afraid
of,” Colin said.

“
Why continue to do
business with someone you’re afraid of?” Alex asked.

“
It’s a good question,”
Joseph said. “Find the reason, find the man.”

“
I’ll make a list of
questions,” Sergeant Dusty said.

“
Royce?” Joseph pointed at
Sergeant Dusty so that Royce would go to help him. Royce
nodded.

“
Alex, do you remember
going to the shop?” Raz asked.

“
Sure,” Alex said. “Jesse
and I found it the first time we were in Paris as a team. Just like
he said — I looked at maps, and Jesse wanted to know about
churches. The place was a fabulous mess. Thousands of books, maps,
pamphlets, collected over more than a hundred years. During the
war, the owner’s father would buy anything anyone brought to him as
a way of saving books from the Nazis and keeping people alive.
Every time we went, we found something neat under a pile of old
books or a dresser or a couch cushion.”

“
Did you buy anything?”
Colin asked.

“
No,” Alex said. “It was
too expensive, especially when we first went there. John and Max
were in college, and Jesse had just gotten married. We were pretty
broke. We found this awesome map tucked up on top of a bookshelf.
It was stuck between the wall and the top of the bookshelf. Mike
sometimes came with us. Like MJ, he was really tall. He saw the
map. The bookstore had owned it for . . . fifty
years, if not more. The owner had never seen it. I went to look at
it every time we were in Paris. Then we didn’t come in for a year.
We’d been too busy chasing after Cee Cee Joiner to come to Paris.
He’d sold it, and I was crushed.”

Alex chuckled.

“
Now, it’s hard to imagine
being that upset about a map,” Alex said.

“
Why that map?” Vince
asked. “You have lots and lots of maps. Why were you so interested
in that map?”

“
It was beautiful, of
course. It was also different,” Alex said. “Unusual. It depicted a
round world, not a flat world. We like to believe that, in the
ignorant past, people thought the world was flat. This map clearly
shows that people knew the world was round in the sixth century.
People were a lot smarter than we give them credit for. The map in
my office is similar, but, like I said, it’s a copy.”

“
I thought Columbus sailed
to prove the world was round,” Leena said.

Alex shook her
head.

“
When did people realize
the world was round?” Colin asked.

“
500 B.C., Pythagoras of
Samoa,” Troy said. “A much-quoted-by-daddy-dearest
fact.”

“
Didn’t Pythagoras go to
Crete?” Vince asked. When everyone turned to look at him, he added,
“Amelia studied the Greeks last fall.”

“
Yes,” Troy
nodded.

“
That’s a great point,”
Alex said. “Linear A is from Crete.”

“
We have a link between
Crete and Linear A,” Matthew said. “Did Pythagoras draw a map of
the world?”

“
Not that we know of,”
Troy said.

“
His mentor and teacher
did,” Alex said. “Anaximander is considered to be the first
cartographer. Of course, we’ve lost his map, as well as Hecataeus
of Miletus’s more accurate, later map. We have estimates of what it
looks like, but . . .”

Raz put his hand on her
back. She looked at him and blushed.

“
The bookstore map?” Raz
asked.

“
Sorry, got lost in
cartography-geekdom,” Alex said. “The bookstore
map . . . uh . . . no. It was not
Anaximander or Hecataeus’s map. It wasn’t a reproduction,
either.”

She furrowed her brow for
a moment. Her throat constricted, and she started to cough. MJ came
to her side to see if he could help. When the coughing subsided,
she looked around the room again. She saw the strain of worry on
her team’s faces. She smiled.

“
The map wasn’t that old,
but . . .” Her voice was ragged after the coughing
fit. Alex nodded, and looked off into the distance. “I need to look
at the map on my wall.”

“
Do you think it’s the map
he’s referring to?” Raz asked.

“
No,” Alex shook her head.
“No way. Mine’s some kind of reproduction. My father gave it to me
as a joke, or that’s what he said.”

Alex shrugged.

“
What do we have?” Matthew
asked.

“
The bookstore owner told
the buyer to look for me, Paul, and Jesse at
Le Fée Verte
,” Alex said.

“
Samantha told the Senator
the Fey Special Forces Team storage was under
Le Fée Verte
,” Raz said.

“
Right,” Alex said. “And
Cooper let them in. One, two, three. That’s how they knew about the
storage vault and entered.”

“
And we know why,” Joseph
said. “They wanted the book.”

“
But . . .”
Vince said and then stopped. The team looked at him.

“
But what?” Alex
asked.

“
Why now?” Troy asked. “Or
then, right?”

“
Right,” Vince said.
“We’ve discovered how they found you, but we don’t know
why
the buyer got so
paranoid. The book’s been missing to him for more than a decade.
Why would he care if a month or two went by?”

“
Why put the Boy Scout on
the team?” Colin asked.

“
Why manipulate the Fey
Special Forces Team bank account?” Troy asked.

“
That’s a lot of effort
all at one time,” Joseph said. “Why then?”

“
Who are ‘they’?” Leena
asked. “Eniac? This mysterious group led by the Russian scientists?
Or . . .?”

“
How are the mysterious
‘they’ connected to the bookseller?” Troy asked.

“
Good questions,” Alex
said.

“
We don’t have good
answers,” Matthew said.

“
Yet,” Alex said. “Yet.
Piece by piece, we will . . . we
are
putting this thing
together.”

She looked from
intelligent face to intelligent face.

“
We’re getting there.
Piece by piece,” she said. “I should get home. I need another round
of antibiotics. I can check whatever maps I have. Raz, can you call
Ben to see if maybe he has antique maps?”

“
Done.” He nodded and took
out his cell phone.

“
Rasmussen? Go with her,”
Matthew ordered. “Trece?”

“
On it,” Trece
said.

Raz stood with
her.

“
We’ll continue to work on
this end,” Matthew said.

“
Thanks.” Alex gave him a
soft smile.

They were in the hallway
when she heard Matthew say, “I want to know where Pythagoras and
Anaximander and Hecataeus went, what they did, and anything else we
can find. Talk to experts. Call universities. We’d be fools to
believe they are not connected — even tangentially — to our
situation here.”

They stopped by Alex’s
office to get her jacket and left the building.

“
Did we stumble onto
something?” Trece asked as they reached her Jeep CJ. He got in the
driver’s seat.

“
I think we did,” Alex
said, as she got in the back seat.

“
About time,” Raz said
when he got into the passenger seat.

F

Chapter
Five

Sunday
afternoon

May 15 — 4:32 p.m.
MDT

Denver,
Colorado

“
I’m home!” Alex said when
she closed the front door to her side of the rooming
house.

Her voice was met with an
expectant coo from her daughter, Máire Wafa Drayson. Her son,
Joseph Amir Drayson, laughed at his sister’s response to Alex’s
voice, and Máire laughed at him. The door to their private living
room was open to the entry, and her twins were lying on a blanket
where they were playing with her mother and their nanny. Maggie,
their English Springer Spaniel, came to greet her. Alex leaned down
to give her some love. Alex looked at Raz.

“
Uncle Raz, too,” Raz
said.

The babies laughed and
squealed. Alex beamed. This was her favorite part of every single
day. They went into the living room.

“
Alex! Raz!” Alex’s
mother, Rebecca Hargreaves, said.

The nanny plucked Máire
from the floor and brought her to Raz. Alex picked up Joey. They
kissed the babies in greeting and swapped kids.

“
How was today?” Alex
asked their nanny, Sergeant Quince Davies. Alex kissed her
daughter’s cheeks and held her close.

Alex had met Sergeant
Davies last year in November at the wife-swapping party she and
John had attended by mistake. When the Taliban learned that
Alex-the-infidel had adopted the babies, they made a video filled
with vague threats, hundreds of AK-47 rounds fired into the air,
and lots of bravado. It was enough for Colonel Gordon to allocate a
Sergeant to care for and protect the kids. Alex had asked Sergeant
Davies if she would like to be their nanny. As the oldest of seven,
Quince had jumped at the chance. She passed round after round of
tests in the care and protection of infants. Less than a month
after the twins came home, Quince had moved into the house and
taken up her role as a nanny.

“
Today was fun,” Quince
said. “We ate and napped. We played with
Grand . . .”

“
Meema,” Rebecca
said.

“
Meema.” Quince suppressed
a smile. “Can I help you with the antibiotics?”

“
Nah, I’ll get it,” Alex
tapped the cannula taped on her arm. “I just have to hook
in.”

“
Yes, sir,” Quince said.
“Grace was here this morning. The twins love Grace.”

“
Everyone loves Grace,”
Alex smiled. Her younger sister, Erin, and Matthew had a shy little
girl who could charm the spots off a leopard.

“
She’s starting to show,”
Quince said.

Alex nodded and put her
fingers to her lips.

“
What was that?” Rebecca
asked. She came to the doorway to the living room. “Is Erin
pregnant?”

Quince gave Alex a guilty
look.

“
No idea, Mom,” Alex
said.

“
Erin took Hector James
and Hermes with her,” Quince said of Troy’s sons. “She’s bringing a
cake to Sunday dinner, and they wanted to teach her their favorite
recipe.”